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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #63188 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63188)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Critic and the Drama, by George Jean
-Nathan
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-
-Title: The Critic and the Drama
-
-
-Author: George Jean Nathan
-
-
-
-Release Date: September 12, 2020  [eBook #63188]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-
-***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA***
-
-
-E-text prepared by David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading
-Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
-Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
-
-
-
-Note: Images of the original pages are available through
-      Internet Archive. See
-      https://archive.org/details/criticdrama00nath
-
-
-Transcriber’s note:
-
-      Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
-
-
-
-
-
-THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA
-
-
-      *      *      *      *      *      *
-
-_THE BOOKS OF GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_
-
-
-_The Theatre_
-
-  COMEDIANS ALL
-  THE POPULAR THEATRE
-  MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS
-  ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE
-  THE THEATRE, THE DRAMA, THE GIRLS
-  THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA
-
-
-_Satire_
-
-  A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE
-  BOTTOMS UP
-
-
-_Plays_
-
-  THE ETERNAL MYSTERY
-  HELIOGABALUS (_in collaboration with H. L. Mencken_)
-
-
-_Philosophy_
-
-  THE AMERICAN CREDO: A CONTRIBUTION TOWARD
-  THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NATIONAL MIND
-  (_in collaboration with H. L. Mencken_)
-
-
-_Travel and Reminiscence_
-
-  EUROPE AFTER 8:15 (_in collaboration with H. L. Mencken_)
-
-      *      *      *      *      *      *
-
-
-THE · CRITIC · AND
-THE · DRAMA
-
-by
-
-GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
-
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-New York       Alfred · A · Knopf       Mcmxxii
-
-Copyright, 1922, by
-Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
-Published January, 1922
-
-Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
-Paper (Warren’s) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.
-Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.
-
-Manufactured in the United States of America
-
-
-
-
-  WITH HIS PERMISSION
-  TO EDWARD GORDON CRAIG
-  THE FIRST ÆSTHETICIAN OF THE THEATRE
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-  CHAPTER
-
-    I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE               3
-
-   II. DRAMA AS AN ART                      29
-
-  III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE             63
-
-   IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING                  83
-
-    V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM                  113
-
-   VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA       133
-
-
-
-
-_Of all the arts and half-arts--perhaps even above that of acting--is
-the art of criticism founded most greatly upon vanity. All criticism
-is, at bottom, an effort on the part of its practitioner to show off
-himself and his art at the expense of the artist and the art which he
-criticizes. The heavy modesty practised by certain critics is but a
-recognition of, and self-conscious attempt to diminish, the fundamental
-and ineradicable vainglory of criticism. The great critics are those
-who, recognizing the intrinsic, permanent and indeclinable egotism of
-the critical art, make no senseless effort to conceal it. The absurd
-critics are those who attempt to conceal it and, in the attempt, make
-their art and themselves doubly absurd._
-
-
-
-
-I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE
-
-
-
-
-I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE
-
-
-I
-
-Art is a reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty
-and the imprisoning of it in a tangible dream. Criticism is the dream
-book. All art is a kind of subconscious madness expressed in terms of
-sanity; criticism is essential to the interpretation of its mysteries,
-for about everything truly beautiful there is ever something mysterious
-and disconcerting. Beauty is not always immediately recognizable as
-beauty; what often passes for beauty is mere infatuation; living beauty
-is like a love that has outlasted the middle-years of life, and has met
-triumphantly the test of time, and faith, and cynic meditation. For
-beauty is a sleep-walker in the endless corridors of the wakeful world,
-uncertain, groping, and not a little strange. And criticism is its
-tender guide.
-
-Art is a partnership between the artist and the artist-critic. The
-former creates; the latter re-creates. Without criticism, art would of
-course still be art, and so with its windows walled in and with its
-lights extinguished would the Louvre still be the Louvre. Criticism
-is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping
-darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible,
-and perhaps altogether unseen.
-
-Criticism, at its best, is a great, tall candle on the altar of art;
-at its worst, which is to say in its general run, a campaign torch
-flaring red in behalf of æsthetic ward-heelers. This campaign torch
-motif in criticism, with its drunken enthusiasm and raucous hollering
-born of ignorance, together with what may be called the Prince Albert
-motif, with its sober, statue-like reserve born of ignorance that,
-being well-mannered, is not so bumptious as the other, has contributed
-largely to the common estimate of criticism as a profession but
-slightly more exalted than Second Avenue auctioneering if somewhat less
-than Fifth. Yet criticism is itself an art. It might, indeed, be well
-defined as an art within an art, since every work of art is the result
-of a struggle between the heart that is the artist himself and his mind
-that is the critic. Once his work is done, the artist’s mind, tired
-from the bitterness of the struggle, takes the form of a second artist,
-puts on this second artist’s strange hat, coat and checkered trousers,
-and goes forth with refreshed vigour to gossip abroad how much of the
-first artist’s work was the result of its original splendid vitality
-and how much the result of its gradually diminished vitality and sad
-weariness. The wrangling that occurs at times between art and criticism
-is, at bottom, merely a fraternal discord, one in which Cain and
-Abel belabour each other with stuffed clubs. Criticism is often most
-sympathetic when it is apparently most cruel: the propounder of the
-sternest, hardest philosophy that the civilized world has known never
-failed sentimentally to kiss and embrace his sister, Therese Elisabeth
-Alexandra Nietzsche, every night at bed-time. “It is not possible,”
-Cabell has written, “to draw inspiration from a woman’s beauty unless
-you comprehend how easy it would be to murder her.” And--“Only those
-who have firmness may be really tender-hearted,” said Rochefoucauld.
-One may sometimes even throw mud to tonic purpose. Consider Karlsbad.
-
-Art is the haven wherein the disillusioned may find illusion. Truth is
-no part of art. Nor is the mission of art simple beauty, as the text
-books tell us. The mission of art is the magnification of simple beauty
-to proportions so heroic as to be almost overpowering. Art is a gross
-exaggeration of natural beauty: there was never a woman so beautiful
-as the Venus di Milo, or a man so beautiful as the Apollo Belvedere
-of the Vatican, or a sky so beautiful as Monet’s, or human speech so
-beautiful as Shakespeare’s, or the song of a nightingale so beautiful
-as Ludwig van Beethoven’s. But as art is a process of magnification,
-so criticism is a process of reduction. Its purpose is the reducing of
-the magnifications of art to the basic classic and æsthetic principles,
-and the subsequent announcement thereof in terms proportioned to the
-artist’s interplay of fundamental skill and overtopping imagination.
-
-The most general fault of criticism lies in a confusion of its own
-internal processes with those of art: it is in the habit of regarding
-the business of art as a reduction of life to its essence of beauty,
-and the business of criticism as an expansion of that essence to its
-fullest flow. The opposite is more reasonable. Art is a beautiful,
-swollen lie; criticism, a cold compress. The concern of art is with
-beauty; the concern of criticism is with truth. And truth and beauty,
-despite the Sunday School, are often strangers. This confusion of the
-business of art and that of criticism has given birth to the so-called
-“contagious,” or inspirational, criticism, than which nothing is more
-mongrel and absurd. Criticism is designed to state facts--charmingly,
-gracefully, if possible--but still facts. It is not designed to exhort,
-enlist, convert. This is the business not of the critic, but of
-those readers of the critic whom the facts succeed in convincing and
-galvanizing. Contagious criticism is merely a vainglorious critic’s
-essay at popularity: facts heated up to a degree where they melt into
-caressing nothingness.
-
-But if this “criticism with a glow” is not to be given countenance,
-even less is to be suffered the criticism that, in its effort at a
-fastidious and elegant reserve, leans so far backward that it freezes
-its ears. This species of criticism fails not only to enkindle the
-reader, but fails also--and this is more important--to enkindle the
-critic himself. The ideal critic is perhaps much like a Thermos bottle:
-full of warmth, he suggests the presence of the heat within him without
-radiating it. This inner warmth is essential to a critic. But this
-inner warmth, where it exists, is automatically chilled and banished
-from a critic by a protracted indulgence in excessive critical reserve.
-Just as the professional frown assumed by a much photographed public
-magnifico often becomes stubbornly fixed upon his hitherto gentle brow,
-so does the prolonged spurious constraint of a critic in due time
-psychologically hoist him on his own petard. A writer’s work does not
-grow more and more like him; a writer grows more and more like his
-work. The best writing that a man produces is always just a little
-superior to himself. There never was a literary artist who did not
-appreciate the difficulty of keeping up to the pace of his writings. A
-writer is dominated by the standard of his own writings; he is a slave
-_in transitu_, lashed, tormented, and miserable. The weak and inferior
-literary artist, such a critic as the one alluded to, soon becomes
-the helpless victim of his own writings: like a vampire of his own
-creation they turn upon him and suck from him the warm blood that was
-erstwhile his. A pose in time becomes natural: a man with a good left
-eye cannot affect a monocle for years without eventually coming to need
-it. A critic cannot write ice without becoming in time himself at least
-partly frosted.
-
-Paraphrasing Pascal, to little minds all things are great. Great art is
-in constant conflict with the awe of little minds. Art is something
-like a wonderful trapeze performer swinging high above the heads of the
-bewildered multitude and nervous lest it be made to lose its balance
-and to slip by the periodic sudden loud marvellings of the folks below.
-The little mind and its little criticism are the flattering foes of
-sound art. Such art demands for its training and triumph the countless
-preliminary body blows of muscular criticism guided by a muscular
-mind. Art and the artist cannot be developed by mere back-slapping. If
-art, according to Beulé, is the intervention of the human mind in the
-elements furnished by experience, criticism is the intervention of the
-human mind in the elements furnished by æsthetic passion. Art and the
-artist are ever youthful lovers; criticism is their chaperon.
-
-
-II
-
-I do not believe finally in this or that “theory” of criticism. There
-are as many sound and apt species of criticism as there are works
-to be criticized. To say that art must be criticized only after this
-formula or after that, is to say that art must be contrived only out
-of this formula or out of that. As every work of art is an entity, a
-thing in itself, so is every piece of criticism an entity, a thing in
-itself. That “Thus Spake Zarathustra” must inevitably be criticized by
-the canons of the identical “theory” with which one criticizes “Tristan
-and Isolde” is surely difficult of reasoning.
-
-To the Goethe-Carlyle doctrine that the critic’s duty lies alone in
-discerning the artist’s aim, his point of view and, finally, his
-execution of the task before him, it is easy enough to subscribe,
-but certainly this is not a “theory” of criticism so much as it is
-a foundation for a theory. To advance it as a theory, full-grown,
-full-fledged and flapping, as it has been advanced by the Italian Croce
-and his admirers, is to publish the preface to a book without the book
-itself. Accepted as a theory complete in itself, it fails by virtue
-of its several undeveloped intrinsic problems, chief among which is
-its neglect to consider the undeniable fact that, though each work of
-art is indubitably an entity and so to be considered, there is yet
-in creative art what may be termed an æsthetic genealogy that bears
-heavily upon comprehensive criticism and that renders the artist’s aim,
-his point of view and his execution of the task before him susceptible
-to a criticism predicated in a measure upon the work of the sound
-artist who has just preceded him.
-
-The Goethe-Carlyle hypothesis is a little too liberal. It calls for
-qualifications. It gives the artist too much ground, and the critic
-too little. To discern the artist’s aim, to discern the artist’s point
-of view, are phrases that require an amount of plumbing, and not a few
-foot-notes. It is entirely possible, for example, that the immediate
-point of view of an artist be faulty, yet the execution of his
-immediate task exceedingly fine. If carefully planned triumph in art
-is an entity, so also may be undesigned triumph. I do not say that any
-such latter phenomenon is usual, but it is conceivable, and hence may
-be employed as a test of the critical hypothesis in point. Unschooled,
-without aim or point of view in the sense of this hypothesis,
-Schumann’s compositions at the age of eleven for chorus and orchestra
-offer the quasi-theory some resistance. The question of the comparative
-merit of these compositions and the artist’s subsequent work may not
-strictly be brought into the argument, since the point at issue is
-merely a theory and since theory is properly to be tested by theory.
-
-Intent and achievement are not necessarily twins. I have always
-perversely thought it likely that there is often a greater degree of
-accident in fine art than one is permitted to believe. The aim and
-point of view of a bad artist are often admirable; the execution of a
-fine artist may sometimes be founded upon a point of view that is, from
-an apparently sound critical estimate, at striking odds with it. One
-of the finest performances in all modern dramatic writing, upon its
-critical reception as such, came as a great surprise to the writer who
-almost unwittingly had achieved it. Art is often unconscious of itself.
-Shakespeare, writing popular plays to order, wrote the greatest plays
-that dramatic art has known. Mark Twain, in a disgusted moment, threw
-off a practical joke, and it turned out to be literature.
-
-A strict adherence to the principles enunciated in the Goethe-Carlyle
-theory would result in a confinement of art for all the theory’s
-bold aim in exactly the opposite direction. For all the critic may
-accurately say, the aim and point of view of, say, Richard Strauss
-in “Don Quixote” and “A Hero’s Life,” may be imperfect, yet the one
-critical fact persists that the executions are remarkably fine. All
-things considered, it were perhaps better that the critical theory
-under discussion, if it be accepted at all, be turned end foremost:
-that the artist’s execution of the task before him be considered
-either apart from his aim and point of view, or that it be considered
-first, and then--with not too much insistence upon them--his point of
-view and his aim. This would seem to be a more logical æsthetic and
-critical order. Tolstoi, with a sound, intelligent and technically
-perfect aim and point of view composed second-rate drama. So, too,
-Maeterlinck. Synge, by his own admissions adjudged critically and
-dramatically guilty on both counts, composed one of the truly
-first-rate dramas of the Anglo-Saxon stage.
-
-In its very effort to avoid pigeon-holing, the Goethe-Carlyle theory
-pigeon-holes itself. In its commendable essay at catholicity, it is
-like a garter so elastic that it fails to hold itself up. That there
-may not be contradictions in the contentions here set forth, I am not
-sure. But I advance no fixed, definite theory of my own; I advance
-merely contradictions of certain of the phases of the theories held
-by others, and contradictions are ever in the habit of begetting
-contradictions. Yet such contradictions are in themselves apposite and
-soundly critical, since any theory susceptible of contradictions must
-itself be contradictory and insecure. If I suggest any theory on my
-part it is a variable one: a theory that, in this instance, is one
-thing and in that, another. Criticism, as I see it--and I share the
-common opinion--is simply a sensitive, experienced and thoroughbred
-artist’s effort to interpret, in terms of æsthetic doctrine and his
-own peculiar soul, the work of another artist reciprocally to that
-artist and thus, as with a reflecting mirror, to his public. But to
-state merely what criticism is, is not to state the doctrine of its
-application. And herein, as I see it, is where the theorists fail to
-cover full ground. The anatomy of criticism is composed not of one
-theory, but of a theory--more or less generally agreed upon--upon which
-are reared in turn other theories that are not so generally agreed
-upon. The Goethe-Carlyle theory is thus like a three-story building on
-which the constructor has left off work after finishing only the first
-story. What certain aspects of these other stories may be like, I have
-already tried to suggest.
-
-I have said that, if I have any theory of my own, it is a theory
-susceptible in practice of numerous surface changes. These surface
-changes often disturb in a measure this or that phase of what lies
-at the bottom. Thus, speaking as a critic of the theatre, I find it
-impossible to reconcile myself to criticizing acting and drama from the
-vantage point of the same theory, say, for example, the Goethe-Carlyle
-theory. This theory fits criticism of drama much better than it
-fits criticism of acting, just as it fits criticism of painting and
-sculpture much more snugly than criticism of music. The means whereby
-the emotions are directly affected, and soundly affected, may at times
-be critically meretricious, yet the accomplishment itself may be,
-paradoxically, artistic. Perhaps the finest acting performance of our
-generation is Bernhardt’s Camille: its final effect is tremendous: yet
-the means whereby it is contrived are obviously inartistic. Again,
-“King Lear,” searched into with critical chill, is artistically a
-poor instance of play-making, yet its effect is precisely the effect
-striven for. Surely, in cases like these, criticism founded strictly
-upon an inflexible theory is futile criticism, and not only futile but
-eminently unfair.
-
-Here, of course, I exhibit still more contradictions, but through
-contradictions we may conceivably gain more secure ground. When his
-book is once opened, the author’s mouth is shut. (Wilde, I believe,
-said that; and though for some peculiar reason it is today regarded as
-suicidal to quote the often profound Wilde in any serious argument,
-I risk the danger.) But when a dramatist’s play or a composer’s
-symphony is opened, the author has only begun to open his mouth. What
-results, an emotional art within an intellectual art, calls for a
-critical theory within a critical theory. To this composite end, I
-offer a suggestion: blend with the Goethe-Carlyle theory that of the
-aforementioned Wilde, to wit, that beauty is uncriticizable, since
-it has as many meanings as man has moods, since it is the symbol of
-symbols, and since it reveals everything because it expresses nothing.
-The trouble with criticism--again to pose a contradiction--is that, in
-certain instances, it is often too cerebral. Feeling a great thrill of
-beauty, it turns to its somewhat puzzled mind and is apprised that the
-thrill which it has unquestionably enjoyed from the work of art might
-conceivably be of pathological origin, a fremitus or vibration felt
-upon percussion of a hydatoid tumour.
-
-The Goethe-Carlyle theory, properly rigid and unyielding so far as
-emotional groundlings are concerned, may, I believe, at times safely
-be chucked under the chin and offered a communication of gipsy ardour
-by the critic whose emotions are the residuum of trial, test and
-experience.
-
-
-III
-
-Coquelin put it that the footlights exaggerate everything: they modify
-the laws of space and of time; they put miles in a few square feet;
-they make minutes appear to be hours. Of this exaggeration, dramatic
-criticism--which is the branch of criticism of which I treat in
-particular--has caught something. Of all the branches of criticism it
-is intrinsically the least sober and the least accurately balanced. It
-always reminds me somehow of the lash in the hands of Œacus, in “The
-Frogs,” falling upon Bacchus and Xanthus to discover which of the two
-is the divine, the latter meantime endeavouring to conceal the pain
-that would betray their mortality by various transparent dodges. Drama
-is a two-souled art: half divine, half clownish. Shakespeare is the
-greatest dramatist who ever lived because he alone, of all dramatists,
-most accurately sensed the mongrel nature of his art. Criticism of
-drama, it follows, is similarly a two-souled art: half sober, half mad.
-Drama is a deliberate intoxicant; dramatic criticism, aromatic spirits
-of ammonia; the re-creation is never perfect; there is always a trace
-of tipsiness left. Even the best dramatic criticism is always just a
-little dramatic. It indulges, a trifle, in acting. It can never be
-as impersonal, however much certain of its practitioners may try, as
-criticism of painting or of sculpture or of literature. This is why the
-best criticism of the theatre must inevitably be personal criticism.
-The theatre itself is distinctly personal; its address is directly
-personal. It holds the mirror not up to nature, but to the spectator’s
-individual idea of nature. If it doesn’t, it fails. The spectator, if
-he is a critic, merely holds up his own mirror to the drama’s mirror: a
-reflection of the first reflection is the result. Dramatic criticism is
-this second reflection. And so the best dramatic criticism has about it
-a flavour of the unconscious, grotesque and unpremeditated. “When Lewes
-was at his business,” Shaw has said, “he seldom remembered that he was
-a gentleman or a scholar.” (Shaw was speaking of Lewes’ free use of
-vulgarity and impudence whenever they happened to be the proper tools
-for his job.) “In this he showed himself a true craftsman, intent on
-making the measurements and analyses of his criticism as accurate, and
-their expression as clear and vivid, as possible, instead of allowing
-himself to be distracted by the vanity of playing the elegant man of
-letters, or writing with perfect good taste, or hinting in every
-line that he was above his work. In exacting all this from himself,
-and taking his revenge by expressing his most laboured conclusions
-with a levity that gave them the air of being the unpremeditated
-whimsicalities of a man who had perversely taken to writing about the
-theatre for the sake of the jest latent in his own outrageous unfitness
-for it, Lewes rolled his stone up the hill quite in the modern manner
-of Mr. Walkley, dissembling its huge weight, and apparently kicking it
-at random hither and thither in pure wantonness.”
-
-Mr. Spingarn, in his exceptionally interesting, if somewhat overly
-indignant, treatise on “Creative Criticism,” provides, it seems to me,
-a particularly clear illustration of the manner in which the proponents
-of the more modern theories of criticism imprison themselves in the
-extravagance of their freedom. While liberating art from all the
-old rules of criticism, they simultaneously confine criticism with
-the new rules--or ghosts of rules--wherewith they free art. If each
-work of art is a unit, a thing in itself, as is commonly agreed,
-why should not each work of criticism be similarly a unit, a thing
-in itself? If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual
-expression, why should not criticism, in each and every such case, be
-similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing
-art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I
-believe that it has been. I believe that there may be as many kinds of
-criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound
-analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic,
-sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of
-criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules--or, at
-least, none save those that are obvious. If Brahms’ scherzo in E flat
-minor, op. 4, is an entity, a work in and of itself, why shouldn’t
-Huneker’s criticism of it be regarded as an entity, a work in and
-of itself? If there is in Huneker’s work inspiration from without,
-so, too, is there in Brahms’: if Brahms may be held a unit in this
-particular instance with no consideration of Chopin, why may not
-Huneker with no consideration of Brahms?
-
-If this is pushing things pretty far, it is the Spingarns who have made
-the pushing necessary. “Taste,” says Mr. Spingarn, “must reproduce the
-work of art within itself in order to understand and judge it; and
-at that moment æsthetic judgment becomes nothing more or less than
-creative art itself.” This rings true. But granting the perfection of
-the taste, why define and limit the critical creative art thus born of
-reproduction? No sooner has a law been enunciated, writes Mr. Spingarn,
-than it has been broken by an artist impatient or ignorant of its
-restraints, and the critics have been obliged to explain away these
-violations of their laws or gradually to change the laws themselves.
-If art, he continues, is organic expression, and every work of art
-is to be interrogated with the question, “What has it expressed, and
-how completely?”, there is no place for the question whether it has
-conformed to some convenient classification of critics or to some law
-derived from this classification. Once again, truly put. But so, too,
-no sooner have laws been enunciated than they have been broken by
-critics impatient or ignorant of their restraints, and the critics of
-critics have been obliged to explain away these violations of the laws,
-or gradually to change the laws themselves. And so, too, have these
-works of criticism provided no place for the question whether they have
-conformed to some convenient classification of the critics of criticism
-or to some law derived from this classification.
-
-“Criticism,” said Carlyle, his theories apart, “stands like an
-interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired, between the
-prophet and those who hear the melody of his words, and catch some
-glimpse of their material meaning, but understand not their deeper
-import.” This is the best definition that I know of. It defines without
-defining; it gives into the keeping of the interpreter the hundred
-languages of art and merely urges him, with whatever means may best and
-properly suit his ends, to translate them clearly to those that do
-not understand; it sets him free from the very shackles which Carlyle
-himself, removing from art, wound in turn about him.
-
-
-
-
-II. DRAMA AS AN ART
-
-
-
-
-II. DRAMA AS AN ART
-
-
-I
-
-If the best of criticism, in the familiar description of Anatole
-France, lies in the adventure of a soul among masterpieces, the best of
-drama may perhaps be described as the adventure of a masterpiece among
-souls. Drama is fine or impoverished in the degree that it evokes from
-such souls a fitting and noble reaction.
-
-Drama is, in essence, a democratic art in constant brave conflict with
-aristocracy of intelligence, soul and emotion. When drama triumphs,
-a masterpiece like “Hamlet” comes to life. When the conflict ends
-in a draw, a drama half-way between greatness and littleness is the
-result--a drama, say, such as “El Gran Galeoto.” When the struggle
-ends in defeat, the result is a “Way Down East” or a “Lightnin’.”
-This, obviously, is not to say that great drama may not be popular
-drama, nor popular drama great drama, for I speak of drama here not
-as this play or that, but as a specific art. And it is as a specific
-art that it finds its test and trial, not in its own intrinsically
-democratic soul, but in the extrinsic aristocratic soul that is taste,
-and connoisseurship, and final judgment. Drama that has come to be
-at once great and popular has ever first been given the imprimatur,
-not of democratic souls, but of aristocratic. Shakespeare and Molière
-triumphed over aristocracy of intelligence, soul and emotion before
-that triumph was presently carried on into the domain of inferior
-intelligence, soul and emotion. In our own day, the drama of Hauptmann,
-Shaw and the American O’Neill has come into its popular own only after
-it first achieved the imprimatur of what we may term the unpopular, or
-undemocratic, theatres. Aristocracy cleared the democratic path for
-Ibsen, as it cleared it, in so far as possible, for Rostand and Hugo
-von Hofmannsthal.
-
-Great drama is the rainbow born when the sun of reflection and
-understanding smiles anew upon an intelligence and emotion which that
-drama has respectively shot with gleams of brilliant lightning and
-drenched with the rain of brilliant tears. Great drama, like great
-men and great women, is always just a little sad. Only idiots may be
-completely happy. Reflection, sympathy, wisdom, gallant gentleness,
-experience--the chords upon which great drama is played--these are
-wistful chords. The commonplace urge that drama, to be truly great,
-must uplift is, in the sense that the word uplift is used, childish.
-The mission of great drama is not to make numskulls glad that they are
-alive, but to make them speculate why they are permitted to be alive
-at all. And since this is the mission of great drama--if its mission
-may, indeed, be reduced to any phrase--it combines within itself,
-together with this mystical and awe-struck appeal to the proletariat,
-a direct and agreeable appeal to such persons as are, by reason of
-their metaphysical perception and emotional culture, superior to and
-contemptuous of the proletariat. Fine drama, in truth, is usually just
-a trifle snobbish. It has no traffic with such souls as are readily
-to be made to feel “uplifted” by spurious philosophical nostrums and
-emotional sugar pills. Its business is with what the matchless Dryden
-hailed “souls of the highest rank and truest understanding”: souls
-who find a greater uplift in the noble depressions of Brahms’ first
-trio, Bartolommeo’s Madonna della Misericordia, and Joseph Conrad’s
-“Youth” than in the easy buoyancies of John Philip Sousa, Howard
-Chandler Christy and Rupert Hughes. The aim of great drama is not to
-make men happy with themselves as they are, but with themselves as
-they might, yet alas cannot, be. As Gautier has it, “The aim of art is
-not exact reproduction of nature, but creation, by means of forms and
-colours, of a microcosm wherein may be produced dreams, sensations, and
-ideas inspired by the aspect of the world.” If drama is irrevocably
-a democratic art and uplift of the great masses of men its noblest
-end, Mrs. Porter’s “Pollyanna” must endure as a work of dramatic art a
-thousand times finer than Corneille’s “Polyeucte.”
-
-Drama has been strictly defined by the ritualists in a dozen different
-ways. “Drama,” says one, “must be based on character, and the action
-proceed from character.” “Drama,” stipulates another, “is not an
-imitation of men, but of an action and of life: character is subsidiary
-to action.” “Drama,” promulgates still another, “is the struggle of a
-will against obstacles.” And so on, so on. Rules, rules and more rules.
-Pigeon-holes upon pigeon-holes. Good drama is anything that interests
-an intelligently emotional group of persons assembled together in an
-illuminated hall. Molière, wise among dramatists, said as much, though
-in somewhat more, and doubtless too, sweeping words. Throughout the
-ages of drama there will be always Romanticists of one sort or another,
-brave and splendid spirits, who will have to free themselves from the
-definitions and limitations imposed upon them by the neo-Bossus and
-Boileaus, and the small portion Voltaires, La Harpes and Marmontels.
-Drama is struggle, a conflict of wills? Then what of “Ghosts”? Drama
-is action? Then what of “Nachtasyl”? Drama is character? Then what of
-“The Dream Play”? “A ‘character’ upon the stage,” wrote the author
-of the last named drama, “has become a creature ready-made--a mere
-mechanism that drives the man--I do not believe in these theatrical
-‘characters.’”
-
-Of all the higher arts, drama is perhaps the simplest and easiest.
-Its anatomy is composed of all the other arts, high and low, stripped
-to their elementals. It is a synthesis of those portions of these
-other arts that, being elemental, are most easily assimilable on the
-part of the multitude. It is a snatch of music, a bit of painting,
-a moment of dancing, a slice of sculpture, draped upon the skeleton
-of literature. At its highest, it ranks with literature, but never
-above it. One small notch below, and it ranks only with itself, in
-its own isolated and generically peculiar field. Drama, indeed, is
-dancing literature: a hybrid art. It is often purple and splendid;
-it is often profoundly beautiful and profoundly moving. Yet, with
-a direct appeal to the emotions as its first and encompassing aim,
-it has never, even at its finest, been able to exercise the measure
-of direct emotional appeal that is exercised, say, by Chopin’s C
-sharp minor Nocturne, op. 27, No. 1, or by the soft romance of the
-canvases of Palma Vecchio, or by Rodin’s superb “Eternal Spring,” or
-by Zola’s “La Terre.” It may, at its finest as at its worst, of course
-subjugate and triumph over inexperienced emotionalism, but the greatest
-drama of Shakespeare himself has never, in the truthful confession
-of cultivated emotionalism, influenced that emotionalism as has the
-greatest literature, or the greatest music, or the greatest painting or
-sculpture. The splendid music of “Romeo” or “Hamlet” is not so eloquent
-and moving as that of “Tristan” or “Lohengrin”; no situation in the
-whole of Hauptmann can strike in the heart so thrilling and profound
-a chord of pity as a single line in Allegri’s obvious “Miserere.” The
-greatest note of comedy in drama falls short of the note of comedy in
-the “Coffee-Cantata” of Bach; the greatest note of ironic remorse
-falls short of that in the scherzo in B minor of Chopin; the greatest
-intellectual note falls short of that in the first and last movements
-of the C minor symphony of Brahms. What play of Sudermann’s has the
-direct appeal of “The Indian Lily”? What play made out of Hardy’s
-“Tess,” however adroitly contrived, retains the powerful appeal of
-the original piece of literature? To descend, what obvious thrill
-melodrama, designed frankly for dollars, has--with all its painstaking
-and deliberate intent--yet succeeded in provoking half the thrill and
-shock of the obvious second chapter of Andreas Latzko’s equally obvious
-“Men in War”?
-
-Art is an evocation of beautiful emotions: art is art in the degree
-that it succeeds in this evocation: drama succeeds in an inferior
-degree. Whatever emotion drama may succeed brilliantly in evoking,
-another art succeeds in evoking more brilliantly.
-
-
-II
-
-Although, of course, one speaks of drama here primarily in the sense
-of acted drama, it is perhaps not necessary so strictly to confine
-one’s self. For when the critic confines himself in his discussion
-of drama to the acted drama, he regularly brings upon himself from
-other critics--chiefly bookish fellows whose theatrical knowledge
-is meagre--the very largely unwarranted embarrassment of arguments
-anent “crowd psychology” and the like which, while they have little
-or nothing to do with the case, none the less make a certain deep
-impression upon his readers. (Readers of criticism become automatically
-critics; with his first sentence, the critic challenges his
-critic-reader’s sense of argument.) This constantly advanced contention
-of “crowd psychology,” of which drama is supposed to be at once master
-and slave, has small place in a consideration of drama, from whatever
-sound point of view one elects to consider the latter. If “crowd
-psychology” operates in the case of theatre drama, it operates also in
-the case of concert-hall music. Yet no one so far as I know seriously
-maintains that, in a criticism of music, this “crowd psychology” has
-any place.
-
-I have once before pointed out that, even accepting the theory of
-crowd psychology and its direct and indirect implications so far as
-drama is concerned, it is as nonsensical to assume that one thousand
-persons assembled together before a drama in a theatre are, by
-reason of their constituting a crowd, any more likely to be moved
-automatically than the same crowd of one thousand persons assembled
-together before a painting in an art gallery. Furthermore, the theory
-that collective intelligence and emotionalism are a more facile and
-ingenuous intelligence and emotionalism, while it may hold full water
-in the psychological laboratory, holds little in actual external
-demonstration, particularly in any consideration of a crowd before one
-of the arts. While it may be true that the Le Bon and Tarde theory
-applies aptly to the collective psychology of a crowd at a prize-fight
-or a bull-fight or a circus, one may be permitted severe doubts that
-it holds equally true of a crowd in a theatre or in an art gallery
-or in a concert hall. The tendency of such a latter group is not
-æsthetically downward, but upward. And not only æsthetically, but
-intellectually and emotionally. (I speak, of course, and with proper
-relevance, of a crowd assembled to hear good drama or good music, or
-to see good painting. The customary obscuring tactic of critics in
-this situation is to argue out the principles of intelligent reaction
-to good drama in terms of yokel reaction to bad drama. Analysis of
-the principles of sound theatre drama and the reaction of a group of
-eight hundred citizens of Marion, Ohio, to “The Two Orphans” somehow do
-not seem to me to be especially apposite.) The fine drama or the fine
-piece of music does not make its auditor part of a crowd; it removes
-him, and every one else in the crowd, from the crowd, and makes him an
-individual. The crowd ceases to exist as a crowd; it becomes a crowd
-of units, of separate individuals. The dramas of Mr. Owen Davis make
-crowds; the dramas of Shakespeare make individuals.
-
-The argument to the contrary always somewhat grotesquely assumes that
-the crowd assembled at a fine play, and promptly susceptible to group
-psychology, is a new crowd, one that has never attended a fine play
-before. Such an assumption falls to pieces in two ways. Firstly, it
-is beyond reason to believe that it is true in more than one instance
-out of a hundred; and secondly it would not be true even if it were
-true. For, granting that a crowd of one thousand persons were seeing
-great drama for the first time in their lives, what reason is there
-for believing that the majority of persons in the crowd who had never
-seen great drama and didn’t know exactly what to make of it would be
-swayed and influenced by the minority who had never seen great drama
-but did know what to make of it? If this were true, no great drama
-could ever possibly fail in the commercial theatre. Or, to test the
-hypothesis further, take it the other way round. What reason is there
-for believing that the majority in this crowd would be moved the one
-way or the other, either by a minority that did understand the play, or
-did not understand it? Or take it in another way still. What reason is
-there for believing that the minority in this crowd who did know what
-the drama was about would be persuaded emotionally by the majority who
-did not know what the drama was about?
-
-Theories, and again theories. But the facts fail to support them.
-Take the lowest type of crowd imaginable, one in which there is not
-one cultured man in a thousand--the crowd, say, at a professional
-American baseball game--and pack it into an American equivalent for
-Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. The play, let us say, is “Œdipus
-Rex.” At the ball game, the crowd psychology of Le Bon operated to the
-full. But what now? Would the crowd, in the theatre and before a great
-drama, be the same crowd? Would it not be an entirely different crowd?
-Would not its group psychology promptly and violently suffer a sudden
-change? Whether out of curiosity, disgust, admiration, social shame
-or what not, would it not rapidly segregate itself, spiritually or
-physically, into various groups? What is the Le Bon theatrical view of
-the crowd psychology that somehow didn’t come off during the initial
-engagement of Barrie’s “Peter Pan” in Washington, D. C.? Or of the
-crowd psychology that worked the other way round when Ibsen was first
-played in London? Or of the crowd psychology that, operating regularly,
-if artificially, at the New York premières, most often fails, for all
-its high enthusiasm, to move either the minority or the majority in its
-composition?
-
-The question of sound drama and the pack psychology of a congress
-of groundlings is a famous one: it gets nowhere. Sound drama and
-sound audiences are alone to be considered at one and the same time.
-And, as I have noted, the tendency of willing, or even semi-willing,
-auditors and spectators is in an upward direction, not a downward. No
-intelligent spectator at a performance of “Ben Hur” has ever been made
-to feel like throwing his hat into the air and cheering by the similar
-actions of the mob spectators to the left and right of him. No ignoble
-auditor of “The Laughter of the Gods” but has been made to feel, in
-some part, the contagion of cultivated appreciation to _his_ left and
-right. “I forget,” wrote Sarcey, in a consideration of the subject of
-which we have been treating, “what tyrant it was of ancient Greece to
-whom massacres were every-day affairs, but who wept copiously over the
-misfortunes of a heroine in a tragedy. He was the audience; and for the
-one evening clothed himself in the sentiments of the public.” A typical
-example of sophisticated reasoning. How does Sarcey know that it was
-not the rest of the audience--the crowd--that was influenced by this
-repentant and copiously lachrymose individual, rather than that it was
-this individual who was moved by the crowd?
-
-If fallacies perchance insinuate themselves into these opposing
-contentions, it is a case of fallacy versus fallacy: my intent is not
-so much to prove anything as to indicate the presence of holes in the
-proofs of the other side. These holes seem to me to be numerous, and of
-considerable circumference. A description of two of them may suffice to
-suggest the rest. Take, as the first of these, the familiar Castelvetro
-doctrine that, since a theatrical audience is not a select congress but
-a motley crowd, the dramatist, ever conscious of the group psychology,
-must inevitably avoid all themes and ideas unintelligible to such a
-gathering. It may be true that a theatrical audience is not a select
-congress, but why confine the argument to theatrical audiences and seek
-thus to prove something of drama that may be proved as well--if one is
-given to such idiosyncrasies--of music? What, as I have said before,
-of opera and concert hall audiences? Consider the average audience
-at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan, Carnegie Hall. Is it any way
-culturally superior to the average audience at the St. James’s Theatre,
-or the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, or the Plymouth--or even the Neighbourhood
-Playhouse down in Grand Street? What of the audiences who attended
-the original performances of Beethoven’s “Leonore” (“Fidelio”),
-Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” the original performances of Wagner
-in France and the performances of his “Der Fliegende Holländer” in
-Germany, the operas of Händel in England in the years 1733-37, the
-work of Rossini in Italy, the concerts of Chopin during his tour of
-England and Scotland?... Again, as to the imperative necessity of the
-dramatist’s avoidance of all themes and ideas unintelligible to a mob
-audience, what of the success among such very audiences of--to name but
-a few more recent profitably produced and locally readily recognizable
-examples--Shaw’s “Getting Married,” Augustus Thomas’ “The Witching
-Hour,” Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” Dunsany’s “The Laughter of the Gods,”
-Barrie’s “Mary Rose,” Strindberg’s “The Father,” Synge’s “Playboy”?...
-Surely it will be quickly allowed that however obvious the themes and
-ideas of these plays may be to the few, they are hardly within the
-ready intelligence of what the theorists picture as the imaginary mob
-theatre audience. Fine drama is independent of all such theories: the
-dramatist who subscribes to them should not figure in any treatise upon
-drama as an art.
-
-A second illustration: the equivocation to the effect that drama,
-being a democratic art, may not properly be evaluated in terms of
-more limited, and aristocratic, taste. It seems to me, at least, an
-idiotic assumption that drama is a more democratic art than music. All
-great art is democratic in intention, if not in reward. Michelangelo,
-Shakespeare, Wagner and Zola are democratic artists, and their art
-democratic art. It is criticism of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Wagner
-and Zola that is aristocratic. Criticism, not art, generically wears
-the ermine and the purple. To appraise a democratic art in terms of
-democracy is to attempt to effect a chemical reaction in nitrogen with
-nitrogen. If drama is, critically, a democratic art since it is meant
-not to be read by the few but to be played before the many, music must
-be critically no less a democratic art. Yet the theorists conveniently
-overlook this embarrassment. Nevertheless, if Shakespeare’s dramas
-were designed for the heterogeneous ear, so, too, were the songs of
-Schumann. No great artist has ever in his heart deliberately fashioned
-his work for a remote and forgotten cellar, dark and stairless. He
-fashions it, for all his doubts, in the hope of hospitable eyes and
-ears, and in the hope of a sun to shine upon it. It is as ridiculous
-to argue that because Shakespeare’s is a democratic art it must be
-criticized in terms of democratic reaction to it as it would be to
-argue that because the United States is a democracy the most acute
-and comprehensive criticism of that democracy must lie in a native
-democrat’s reaction to it. “To say that the theatre is for the people,”
-says Gordon Craig, “is necessary. But to forget to add that part and
-parcel of the people is the aristocracy, whether of birth or feeling,
-is an omission. A man of the eighteenth century, dressed in silks, in
-a fashionable loggia in the theatre at Versailles, looking as if he
-did no work (as Voltaire in his youth may have looked), presents, in
-essence, exactly the same picture as Walt Whitman in his rough gray
-suit lounging in the Bowery, also looking as if he did no work.... One
-the aristocrat, one the democrat: the two are identical.”
-
-
-III
-
-“Convictions,” said Nietzsche, “are prisons.” Critical “theories,” with
-negligible exception, seek to denude the arts of their splendid, gipsy
-gauds and to force them instead to don so many duplicated black and
-white striped uniforms. Of all the arts, drama has suffered most in
-this regard. Its critics, from the time of Aristotle, have bound and
-fettered it, and have then urged it impassionedly to soar. Yet, despite
-its shackles, it has triumphed, and each triumph has been a derision
-of one of its most famous and distinguished critics. It triumphed,
-through Shakespeare, over Aristotle; it triumphed, through Molière,
-over Castelvetro; it triumphed, through Lemercier, over Diderot; it
-triumphed, through Lessing, over Voltaire; it triumphed, through
-Ibsen, over Flaubert; it has triumphed, through Hauptmann, over Sarcey
-and, through Schnitzler and Bernard Shaw, over Mr. Archer. The truth
-perhaps is that drama is an art as flexible as the imaginations of its
-audiences. It is no more to be bound by rules and theories than such
-imaginations are to be bound by rules and theories. Who so all-wise
-that he may say by what rules or set of rules living imaginations
-and imaginations yet unborn are to be fanned into theatrical flame?
-“Imagination,” Samuel Johnson’s words apply to auditor as to artist,
-“a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and
-impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician,
-to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the inclosures of
-regularity.” And further, “There is therefore scarcely any species
-of writing of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are
-its constituents; every new genius produces some innovation which,
-when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of
-foregoing authors had established.”
-
-Does the play interest, and whom? This seems to me to be the only
-doctrine of dramatic criticism that is capable of supporting itself
-soundly. First, does the play interest? In other words, how far has the
-dramatist succeeded in expressing himself, and the materials before
-him, intelligently, eloquently, symmetrically, beautifully? So much for
-the criticism of the dramatist as an artist. In the second place, whom
-does the play interest? Does it interest inferior persons, or does it
-interest cultivated and artistically sensitive persons? So much for the
-criticism of the artist as a dramatist.
-
-The major difficulty with critics of the drama has always been that,
-having once positively enunciated their critical credos, they have
-been constrained to devote their entire subsequent enterprise and
-ingenuity to defending the fallacies therein. Since a considerable
-number of these critics have been, and are, extraordinarily shrewd and
-ingenious men, these defences of error have often been contrived with
-such persuasive dexterity and reasonableness that they have endured
-beyond the more sound doctrines of less deft critics, doctrines which,
-being sound, have suffered the rebuffs that gaunt, grim logic, ever
-unprepossessing and unhypnotic, suffers always. “I hope that I am
-right; if I am not right, I am still right,” said Brunetière. “Mr.
-William Archer is not only, like myself, a convinced, inflexible
-determinist,” Henry Arthur Jones has written, “I am persuaded that
-he is also, unlike myself, a consistent one. I am sure he takes care
-that his practice agrees with his opinions--even when they are wrong.”
-Dramatic criticism is an attempt to formulate rules of conduct for the
-lovable, wayward, charming, wilful vagabond that is the drama. For the
-drama is an art with a feather in its cap and an ironic smile upon its
-lips, sauntering impudently over forbidden lawns and through closed
-lanes into the hearts of those of us children of the world who have
-never grown up. Beside literature, it is the Mother Goose of the arts:
-a gorgeous and empurpled Mother Goose for the fireside of impressible
-and romantic youth that, looking upward, leans ever hushed and
-expectant at the knee of life. It is a fairy tale told realistically,
-a true story told as romance. It is the lullaby of disillusion, the
-chimes without the cathedral, the fears and hopes and dreams and
-passions of those who cannot fully fear and hope and dream and flame of
-themselves.
-
-“The drama must have reality,” so Mr. P. P. Howe in his engaging
-volume of “Dramatic Portraits,” “but the first essential to our
-understanding of an art is that we should not believe it to be actual
-life. The spectator who shouts his warning and advice to the heroine
-when the villain is approaching is, in the theatre, the only true
-believer in the hand of God; and he is liable to find it in a drama
-lower than the best.” The art of the drama is one which imposes
-upon drama the obligation of depicting at once the inner processes
-of life realistically, and the external aspects of life delusively.
-Properly and sympathetically to appreciate drama, one must look upon
-it synchronously with two different eyes: the one arguing against
-the other as to the truth of what it sees, and triumphing over this
-doubtful other with the full force of its sophistry. Again inevitably
-to quote Coleridge, “Stage presentations are to produce a sort of
-temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and
-supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows
-that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is.
-Thus the true stage illusion as to a forest scene consists, not in the
-mind’s judging it to be a forest, but in its remission of the judgment
-that it is not a forest.” This obviously applies to drama as well as
-to dramatic investiture. One never for a moment believes absolutely
-that Mr. John Barrymore is Richard III; one merely agrees, for the sake
-of Shakespeare, who has written the play, and Mr. Hopkins, who has
-cast it, that Mr. John Barrymore is Richard III, that one may receive
-the ocular, aural and mental sensations for which one has paid three
-dollars and a half. Nor does one for a moment believe that Mr. Walter
-Hampden, whom that very evening one has seen dividing a brobdingnagian
-dish of goulash with Mr. Oliver Herford in the Player’s Club and
-discussing the prospects of the White Sox, is actually speaking
-extemporaneously the rare verbal embroideries of Shakespeare; or that
-Miss Ethel Barrymore who is billed in front of Browne’s Chop House to
-take a star part in the Actors’ Equity Association’s benefit, is really
-the queen of a distant kingdom.
-
-The dramatist, in the theatre, is not a worker in actualities, but in
-the essence of actualities that filters through the self-deception of
-his spectators. There is no such thing as realism in the theatre: there
-is only mimicry of realism. There is no such thing as romance in the
-theatre: there is only mimicry of romance. There is no such thing as an
-automatic dramatic susceptibility in a theatre audience: there is only
-a volitional dramatic susceptibility. Thus, it is absurd to speak of
-the drama holding the mirror up to nature; all that the drama can do
-is to hold nature up to its own peculiar mirror which, like that in a
-pleasure-park carousel, amusingly fattens up nature, or shrinks it, yet
-does not at any time render it unrecognizable. One does not go to the
-theatre to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in
-which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and
-entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright. Drama is the
-surprising pulling of a perfectly obvious, every-day rabbit out of a
-perfectly obvious, every-day silk hat. The spectator has seen thousands
-of rabbits and thousands of silk hats, but he has never seen a silk hat
-that had a rabbit concealed in it, and he is curious about it.
-
-But if drama is essentially mimetic, so also--as Professor Gilbert
-Murray implies--is criticism essentially mimetic in that it is
-representative of the work criticized. It is conceivable that one may
-criticize Mr. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” in terms of the “Philoctetes” of
-Theodectes--I myself have been guilty of even more exceptional feats;
-it is not only conceivable, but of common occurrence, for certain of
-our academic American critics to criticize the plays of Mr. Shaw in
-terms of Scribe and Sardou, and with a perfectly straight face; but
-criticism in general is a chameleon that takes on something of the
-colour of the pattern upon which it imposes itself. There is drama
-in Horace’s “Epistola ad Pisones,” a criticism of drama. There is
-the spirit of comedy in Hazlitt’s essay “On the Comic Writers of the
-Last Century.” Dryden’s “Essay on Dramatic Poesy” is poetry. There
-is something of the music of Chopin in Huneker’s critical essays on
-Chopin, and some of Mary Garden’s spectacular histrionism in his essay
-on her acting. Walkley, criticizing “L’Enfant Prodigue,” uses the pen
-of Pierrot. Criticism, more than drama with her mirror toward nature,
-holds the mirror up to the nature of the work it criticizes. Its end
-is the revivification of the passion of art which has been spent in
-its behalf, but under the terms laid down by Plato. Its aim is to
-reconstruct a great work of art on a diminutive scale, that eyes
-which are not capable of gazing on high may have it within the reach
-of their vision. Its aim is to play again all the full richness of
-the artist’s emotional organ tones, in so far as is possible, on the
-cold cerebral xylophone that is criticism’s deficient instrument. In
-the accomplishment of these aims, it is bound by no laws that art is
-not bound by. There is but one rule: there are no rules. Art laughs at
-locksmiths.
-
-It has been a favourite diversion of critics since Aristotle’s day to
-argue that drama is drama, whether one reads it from a printed page
-or sees it enacted in a theatre. Great drama, they announce, is great
-drama whether it ever be acted or not; “it speaks with the same voice
-in solitude as in crowds”; and “all the more then”--again I quote Mr.
-Spingarn--“will the drama itself ‘even apart from representation and
-actors,’ as old Aristotle puts it, speak with its highest power to the
-imagination fitted to understand and receive it.” Upon this point of
-view much of the academic criticism of drama has been based. But may
-we not well reply that, for all the fact that Shakespeare would still
-be the greatest dramatist who ever lived had he never been played in
-the theatre, so, too, would Bach still be the greatest composer who
-ever lived had his compositions never been played at all? If drama is
-not meant for actors, may we not also argue that music is not meant for
-instruments? Are not such expedients less sound criticism than clever
-evasion of sound criticism: a frolicsome and agreeable straddling
-of the æsthetic see-saw? There is the printed drama--criticize it.
-There is the same drama acted--criticize it. Why quibble? Sometimes,
-as in the case of “Gioconda” and Duse, they are one. Well and good.
-Sometimes, as in the case of “Chantecler” and Maude Adams, they are not
-one. Well and good. But where, in either case, the confusion that the
-critics lay such stress upon? These critics deal not with theories,
-but with mere words. They take two dozen empty words and adroitly seek
-therewith to fashion a fecund theory. The result is--words. “Words
-which,” said Ruskin, “if they are not watched, will do deadly work
-sometimes. There are masked words droning and skulking about us just
-now ... (there never were so many, owing to the teaching of catechisms
-and phrases at school instead of human meanings) ... there never were
-creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning,
-never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words: they are the unjust
-stewards of men’s ideas....”
-
-
-
-
-III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE
-
-
-
-
-III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE
-
-
-I
-
-The theatre stands in relation to drama much as the art gallery
-stands in relation to painting. Its aim is to set off drama in such
-surroundings and in such light as to bring it within the comfortable
-vision and agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To say that fine
-drama may produce an equal effect read as acted may be true or not as
-you choose, but so too a fine painting may produce an equal effect
-beheld in one’s library as in the Uffizi. Art thrives--art leads to
-art--on sympathy and a measure of general understanding. Otherwise,
-of what use criticism? To divorce the theatre from a consideration of
-drama as an art, to contend, as it has been contended from Aristotle’s
-day to Corneille’s, and from Dryden’s and Lamb’s to our own, that
-“the more lasting and noble design” of drama rests in a reading rather
-than a seeing, may be, strictly, a logical æsthetic manœuvre, but
-equally a logical æsthetic manœuvre would be a divorcement of canvas
-from painting as an art. The theatre is the canvas of drama. The
-printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only
-by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the
-theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and
-emotionally ill people.
-
-The criticism that nominates itself to hold drama and the theatre as
-things apart is a criticism which, for all its probable integrity and
-reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, like a duchess in a play
-by Mr. Sydney Grundy. Its æsthetic nose is elevated to such a degree
-that it may no longer serve as a practical organ of earthly smell,
-but merely as a quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry of the
-face. It is criticism in a stiff corset, erect, immobile, lordly--like
-the Prussian lieutenant of yesterday, a striking figure, yet just a
-little absurd. It is sound, but like many things that are sound in
-æsthetics, it has its weak points, even its confounding points. For
-they say that propaganda can have no place in art, and along comes a
-Hauptmann and writes a “Weavers.” Or they say that art is form, and
-along comes a Richard Strauss and composes two songs for baritone and
-orchestra that set the critics to a mad chasing of their own tails. Or,
-opposing criticism as an art, they say that “criticism is art in form,
-but its content is judgment, which takes it out of the intuitional
-world into the conceptual world”--and along comes an H. G. Wells with
-his “The New Machiavelli” which, like criticism, is art in form and
-its content judgment. To hold that the drama as an art may achieve
-its highest end read by the individual and not acted in the theatre,
-is to hold that music as an art may achieve its highest end played by
-but one instrument and not by an orchestra. The theatre is the drama’s
-orchestra: upon the wood of its boards and the wind of its puppets is
-the melody of drama in all its full richness sounded. What if drama
-is art and the theatre not art? What if “Hamlet” is art and electric
-lights and cheese-cloth are not art? Schubert’s piano trio, op. 99,
-is art, and a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing a number of
-little hammers that hit an equal number of steel and copper wires.
-What if I can read a full imagination into “Romeo and Juliet” and thus
-people it and make it live for me, without going to the theatre? So,
-too, can I read a full melody into the manuscript of a song by Hugo
-Wolf and thus make it sing for me, without going to a concert hall. But
-why? Is there only one way to appreciate and enjoy art--and since when?
-Wagner on a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the orchestra is
-super-Wagner. To read a great drama is to play “Parsifal” on a cornet
-and an oboe.
-
-The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually maintained, a
-shrewd excitation of the imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd
-relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty axiom that holds the
-greatest actor in the theatre to be an audience’s imagination, and
-the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever productive of large
-financial return. As I have on more than one occasion pointed out from
-available and acutely relevant statistics, the more a dramatist relies
-upon the imagination, of an audience, the less the box-office reward
-that is his. An audience fills a theatre auditorium not so eager to
-perform with its imagination as to have its imagination performed
-upon. This is not the paradox it may superficially seem to be. The
-difference is the difference between a prompt commercial failure like
-Molnar’s “Der Gardeofficier” (“Where Ignorance Is Bliss”) which asks
-an audience to perform with its imagination and a great commercial
-success like Barrie’s “Peter Pan” which performs upon the audience’s
-imagination by supplying to it every detail of imagination, ready-made
-and persuasively labelled. The theatre is not a place to which one
-goes in search of the unexplored corners of one’s imagination; it is
-a place to which one goes in repeated search of the familiar corners
-of one’s imagination. The moment the dramatist works in the direction
-of unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily enough, is
-granted by the very critics who hold to the imagination fallacy which
-I have just described. They unanimously agree that a dramatist’s most
-successful cultivation of an audience lies in what they term, and
-nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the same breath paradoxically
-contend that sudden imaginative shock is a desideratum no less.
-
-In this pleasant remission of the active imagination lies one of the
-secrets of the charm of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in
-this. On even the higher plane of the authentic arts a measure of the
-same phenomenon assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly be
-termed the negative stimulation of the spectator’s fancy. For all the
-pretty and winning words to the contrary, no person capable of sound
-introspection will admit that a beautiful painting like Giorgione’s
-“The Concert” or a beautiful piece of sculpture like Pisano’s Perugian
-fountain actually and literally stirs his imagination, and sets it
-a-sail across hitherto uncharted æsthetic seas. What such a painting
-or piece of sculpture does is to reach out and, with its overpowering
-beauty, encompass and æsthetically fence in the antecedent wandering
-and uncertain imagination of its spectator. As in the instance of
-drama, it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination as soothe an
-imagination already awake. Of all the arts, music alone remains a
-telegrapher of unborn dreams.
-
-The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete movement, concrete
-colour, and concrete final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor
-particulars. The art of drama suffers, true enough, when the theatre,
-even at its finest, is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic
-in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle on Bosworth Field, or in
-its ship torn by the tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer night,
-or in its approaching tread of doom of the gods of the mountain. But
-for each such defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the theatre
-brings to it. Such gifts as the leader Craig has brought to the
-furtherance of the beauty of “Electra” and “Hamlet,” as Reinhardt and
-his aides have brought to “Ariadne” and “Julius Cæsar,” as Golovine
-and Appia and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen others have
-brought to the classics that have called to them, are not small ones.
-They have crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so many loose
-jewels and given them substantial and appropriate settings which have
-fittingly posed their radiance. To say that the reading imagination
-of the average cultured man is superior in power of suggestion and
-depiction to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically to say that
-the reading imagination of every average cultured man is superior in
-these powers to the combined theatrical imaginations of Gordon Craig,
-Max Reinhardt and Eleanora Duse operating jointly upon the same play.
-Even a commonplace imagination can successfully conjure up a landscape
-more beautiful than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough, or jewels
-more opalescent than any painted by Rembrandt, or a woman’s dress more
-luminous than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs more beguiling than
-any of Rubens’, yet who so foolish to say--as they are wont foolishly
-to say of reading imagination and the drama--that such an imagination
-is therefore superior to that of the artists? This, in essence, is
-none the less the serious contention of those who decline to reconcile
-themselves to the theatrically produced drama. This contention, reduced
-to its skeleton, is that, since the vice-president of the Corn Exchange
-Bank can picture the chamber in the outbuilding adjoining Gloster’s
-castle more greatly to his satisfaction than Adolphe Appia can picture
-it for him on the stage, the mental performance of the former is
-therefore a finer artistic achievement than the stage performance of
-the latter.
-
-
-II
-
-The word imagination leads critics to queer antics. It is, perhaps,
-the most manhandled word in our critical vocabulary. It is used
-almost invariably in its literal meaning: no shades and shadows are
-vouchsafed to it. Imagination, in good truth, is not the basis of art,
-but an overtone. Many an inferior artist has a greater imagination
-than many a superior artist. Maeterlinck’s imagination is much richer
-than Hauptmann’s, Erik Satie’s is much richer than César Franck’s,
-and I am not at all certain that Romain Rolland’s is not twice as
-opulent as Thomas Hardy’s. Imagination is the slave of the true artist,
-the master of the weak. The true artist beats imagination with the
-cat-o’-nine-tails of his individual technic until it cries out in pain,
-and this pain is the work of art which is born. The inferior craftsman
-comfortably confounds imagination with the finished work, and so pets
-and coddles it; and imagination’s resultant mincings and giggles he
-then vaingloriously sets forth as resolute art.
-
-The theatre offers to supplement, embroider and enrich the imagination
-of the reader of drama with the imaginations of the actor, the scene
-designer, the musician, the costumer and the producing director.
-Each of these, before he sets himself to his concrete task, has--like
-the lay reader--sought the fruits of his own reading imagination.
-The fruits of these five reading imaginations are then assembled,
-carefully assorted, and the most worthy of them deftly burbanked.
-The final staging of the drama is merely a staging of these best
-fruits of the various reading imaginations. To say, against this,
-that it is most often impossible to render a reading imagination into
-satisfactory concrete forms is doubtless to say what is, strictly,
-true. But art itself is at its highest merely an approach toward
-limitless imagination and beauty. Æsthetics is a pilgrim on the road to
-a Mecca that is ever just over the sky-line. Of how many great works
-of art can one say, with complete and final conviction, that art in
-this particular direction can conceivably go no farther? Is it not
-conceivable that some super-Michelangelo will some day fashion an even
-more perfect “Slave,” and some super-Shakespeare an even more beautiful
-poetic drama?
-
-The detractors of the theatre are often expert in persuasive
-half-truths and masters of dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their
-performances are often so adroit that the spectator is quick to believe
-that the trunk is really empty, yet the false bottom is there for
-all its cunning concealment. Take, for example, George Moore, in the
-preface to his last play, “The Coming of Gabrielle.” “The illusion
-created by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and short sentences
-is in itself illusory,” he professes to believe, though why he numbers
-the dramatist’s short sentences among the externals of the stage
-is not quite clear. “The best performances of plays and operas are
-witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was never so like Tristan at
-night as he was in the afternoon when he sang the part in a short
-jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and
-the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our
-thoughts on periods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in
-Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships
-in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd night-dress which
-is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never
-wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers
-that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the
-moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play
-Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The
-moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the
-illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the
-mummer.” Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given the title
-“Another Book on the Theatre,” I took a boyish delight in setting off
-precisely the same noisy firework just to hear the folks in the piazza
-rocking-chairs let out a yell. These half-truths serve criticism as
-sauce serves asparagus: they give tang to what is otherwise often
-tasteless food. This is particularly true with criticism at its most
-geometrical and profound, since such criticism, save in rare instances,
-is not especially lively reading. But, nevertheless, the sauce is not
-the asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless with his tongue in his
-cheek) observes that he can much more readily imagine the lusty Frau
-Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink and green ostrich feather hat
-confected in some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary stage
-trappings, he allows, by implication, that he might even more readily
-imagine the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen if she had no
-clothes on at all.
-
-This is the trouble with paradoxes. It is not that they prove too
-little, as is believed of them, but that they prove altogether
-too much. If the illusion created by stage externals is in itself
-illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the complete deletion of all such stage
-externals should be the best means for providing absolute illusion.
-Yet the complete absence of illusion where this is the case is all too
-familiar to any of us who have looked on such spectacles as “The Bath
-of Phryne” and the like in the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of
-stage externals does not contribute to disillusion, but to illusion.
-These externals have become, through protracted usage, so familiar
-that they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are taken by the eye
-for granted. By way of proof, one need only consider two types of
-Shakespearian production, one like that of Mr. Robert Mantell and one
-like that lately employed for “Macbeth” by Mr. Arthur Hopkins. Where
-the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of
-the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear
-for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly
-bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and
-makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be
-changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft
-shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of
-externals is a convention at present. But, as things are today, these
-externals are, negatively, the most positive contributors to illusion.
-
-It is the misfortune of the theatre that critics have almost always
-approached it, and entered it, with a defiant and challenging air. I
-have, during the eighteen years of my active critical service, met
-with and come to know at least fifty professional critics in America,
-in England and on the Continent, and among all this number there
-have been but four who have approached the theatre enthusiastically
-prejudiced in its favour--two of them asses. But between the one large
-group that has been critically hostile and the other smaller group
-that has been uncritically effervescent, I have encountered no sign
-of calm and reasoned compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent
-willingness to regard each and every theatre as a unit, and so to be
-appraised, instead of lumping together good and bad theatres alike
-and labelling the heterogeneous mass “the theatre.” There is no such
-thing as “the theatre.” There is this theatre, that theatre, and still
-that other theatre. Each is a unit. To talk of “the theatre” is to
-talk of the Greek theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern
-theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously of the Grosses
-Schauspielhaus of Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of Mr. A.
-H. Woods. “The theatre,” of course, has certain more or less minor
-constant and enduring conventions--at least, so it seems as far as we
-now can tell--but so, too, has chirography, yet we do not speak of “the
-chirography.” There are some theatres--I use the word in its proper
-restricted sense--that glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there are
-others that vitiate drama. But so also are there some men who write
-fine drama, and others who debase drama to mere fodder for witlings....
-The Shakespeare of the theatre of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant
-beauty. Call it art or not art as you will--what does a label matter?
-The Molière of the theatre of Alexander Golovine is suggestive and
-exquisite enchantment. Call it art or not art as you will--what does
-a label matter? The Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert is
-triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call it anything you like--and
-again, what does a label matter? There are too many labels in the
-world.
-
-
-
-
-IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING
-
-
-
-
-IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING
-
-
-I
-
-“When Mr. Nathan says that acting is not an art, of course he is
-talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance
-by the great Duse?” So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold Daly. Whether
-acting is or is not an art, it is not my concern at the moment to
-consider, yet I quote the _riposte_ of Mr. Daly as perhaps typical of
-those who set themselves as defenders of the yea theory. It seems to
-me that if this is a satisfactory _touche_ no less satisfactory should
-be some such like rejoinder as: “When Mr. Nathan says that acting _is_
-an art, of course he is talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after
-witnessing a performance by Mr. Corse Payton.”
-
-If an authentic art is anything which may properly be founded upon an
-exceptionally brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the Reverend
-Doctor Ernest M. Stires’ brilliant performance in it, is pulpiteering
-an art, and, on the strength of Miss Bird Millman’s brilliant
-performance in it, is tight-rope walking an art no less. Superficially
-a mere dialectic monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd as it
-may seem, for if Duse’s art lies in the fact that she breathes life and
-dynamic effect into the written word of the artist D’Annunzio, Stires’
-lies in the more substantial fact that he breathes life and dynamic
-effect into the word of the somewhat greater, and more evasive artist,
-God. And Miss Millman, too, brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour,
-rhythm, beauty and--one may even say--a sense of fantastic character,
-since the effect she contrives is less that of a dumpy little woman
-in a short white skirt pirouetting on a taut wire than of an unreal
-creature, half bird, half woman, out of some forgotten fable.
-
-The circumstance that Duse is an artist who happens to be an actress
-does not make acting an art any more than the circumstance that Villon
-was an artist who happened to be a burglar or that Paderewski is an
-artist who happens to be a politician makes burglary and politics arts.
-Duse is an artist first, and an actress second: one need only look into
-her very great share in the creation of the dramas bearing the name of
-D’Annunzio to reconcile one’s self--if not too stubborn, at least in
-part--to this point of view. So, also, were Clairon, Rachel and Jane
-Hading artists apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah Bernhardt:
-who can fail to detect the creative artist in the “Mémoires” of the
-first named, for instance, or, in the case of the last named, in the
-fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture, painting and dramatic
-literature? It is a curious thing that, in all the pronouncements of
-acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates as representative
-carriers of the æsthetic banner are those of actors and actresses who
-have most often offered evidence of artistic passion in fields separate
-and apart from their histrionic endeavours. Lemaître, Salvini, Rachel,
-Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick, Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts,
-Irving, Tree, and on down--far down--the line to Ditrichstein, Sothern,
-Marie Tempest, Guitry, Gemier and the brothers Barrymore--all give
-testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship, poetry and dramatic
-authorship to æsthetic impulses other than acting. Since acting itself
-as an art is open to question, the merit or demerit of the performances
-produced from the æsthetic impulses in point is not an issue: the fact
-seems to be that it has been the artist who has become the actor rather
-than the actor who has become the artist.
-
-The actor, as I have on another occasion hazarded, is the child of the
-miscegenation of an art and a trade: of the drama and the theatre.
-Since acting must appeal to the many--this is obviously its only
-reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama
-may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers--it must,
-logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or
-thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike
-great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the
-crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that
-this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. If,
-therefore, the actor or actress who can sway great crowds is strictly
-to be termed an artist, why may we not also, by strict definition,
-similarly term as exponents of an authentic art others who can likewise
-sway the same crowds: a great politician like Roosevelt, say, or a
-great lecturer like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian
-like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out these paradox shock-troops to clear
-the way for the more sober infantry.)
-
-I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as
-an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution
-has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still
-sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason
-to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more
-penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an
-art has in reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama
-interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely,
-_with the imagination of the dramatist_. In other words, that actor
-or actress is the most competent and effective whose imagination is
-successful in meeting literally, and translating, the imagination of
-the dramatist which has created the rôle played by the particular actor
-or actress. To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative
-imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but
-merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art
-would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever
-brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative
-imagination of Shakespeare. This would be, on an actor’s part, the
-sheerest impudence. The greatest actor is simply he who is best fitted
-by figure, voice, training and intelligence not to invade and annul the
-power of the rôle which a great dramatist has imagined and created.
-Duse and D’Annunzio were, so to speak, spiritually and physically
-one: hence the unmatched perfection of the former’s histrionism in the
-latter’s rôles. To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self critically
-to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical art doubts and the
-convictions of such as Mr. Daly.
-
-It is, of course, the common habit of the prejudiced critic to
-overlook, in the estimate of acting as an art, the few admirable
-exponents of acting and to take into convenient consideration only the
-enormous majority of incompetents. But to argue that acting is not an
-art simply because a thousand Edmund Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give
-no evidence that it is an art is to argue that sculpture is not an art
-simply because a thousand fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris
-busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding give no evidence in a like
-direction. Yet the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent
-actors as well as bad actors establishes acting as an art no more than
-the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers
-as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes the playing of the
-cuckoo-whistle as an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison to what
-appears to be an absurdity, it is because by such absurdities, or
-elementals, is the status of acting in the field of the arts most
-sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s ever-haunting cry of the
-heart in “Izeyl” is a peg, however slight, upon which may be hung a
-strand of the theory that maintains acting as an art, so too, by the
-strict canon of dialectics, is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of
-the cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral
-Symphony.
-
-If acting is an art, the proofs thus far offered are not only
-unconvincing but fundamentally, on the score of logic, not a little
-droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If criticism is an art (thus
-a familiar contention), why is not acting also an art, since both are
-concerned with re-creating works of art? But the artist’s work offered
-up to the critic is a challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work offered
-up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism is war, whether in behalf of
-æsthetic friend or against æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, peace.
-The critic re-creates, in terms of his own personality, the work of
-another and often emphatically different and antagonistic personality.
-The actor re-creates, in terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined
-personality, his own personality: the result is less re-creation
-than non-re-creation. In other words, the less the actor creates or
-re-creates and the more he remains simply an adaptable tool in the
-hands of the dramatist, the better actor he is. The actor’s state is
-thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. Originality and
-independence, save within the narrowest of limits, are denied him.
-He is a literal translator of a work of art, not an independently
-imaginative and speculative interpreter, as the critic is. The
-dramatist’s work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, “Here I
-am! What do you, out of all your experience, taste and training, think
-of me?” It says to him, instead and peremptorily, “Here I am! Think
-of me exactly as I am, and adapt all of your experience, taste and
-training to the interpretation of me exactly as I am!”
-
-Brushing aside the theory that the true artist is the actor who can
-transform his voice, his manner, his character; who will disappear
-behind his part instead of imposing himself on it and adding himself to
-it--a simple feat, since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli and
-Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean actors, are true histrionic
-artists--Mr. Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor of Today,”
-bravely takes up the defence from what he regards as a more difficult
-approach. “In the art of acting as in any other art,” he says, “the
-first requisite is life. The actor’s part is a series of speeches and
-stage directions, mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised
-somehow from the dead. If the actor disappears behind it, there is
-nothing left but a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! Hamlet, Iago,
-Romeo, Shylock--mere “cold print,” inert Shakespearian masses that,
-in order to live, have to be raised somehow from the dead by members
-of the Lambs’ Club! It is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly
-takes to cover after launching this torpedo, and devotes the balance
-of his interesting comments to a prudent and circumspect _pas seul_ on
-the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. For no sooner has
-he described the majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold print, an
-inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead,” than he seems
-suddenly, and not without a touch of horror, to realize that he has
-ridiculously made of Shakespeare a mere blank canvas and pot of paint
-for the use of this or that actor whom he has named, by implication and
-with magnificent liberalness, a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble
-for the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined Mercié.
-
-
-II
-
-Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable art takes its key
-from Rémond de Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman whose
-pragmatic critical credo was, “If it makes me feel, it is art.”
-While it may be reasonable that a purely emotional art may aptly be
-criticized according to the degree of emotional reaction which it
-induces, it is the quality of emotion resident in the critic that
-offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. A perfectly
-attuned and sound emotional equipment--an emotional equipment of
-absolute pitch, so to speak--is a rare thing, even among critics of
-brilliant intelligence, taste, imagination and experience. Goethe,
-Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention only five, were
-physio-psychological units of dubious emotional structure, if we may
-trust the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of their critical
-dramatic writing may be accepted without qualm, a distinct measure of
-distrust would attach itself to any critical estimate of acting which
-they might have written or actually did write.
-
-There are, obviously, more or less definite standards whereby we
-may estimate critical writings of such men as these so far as those
-criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe as the cerebral
-or semi-cerebral arts, but there are no standards, even remotely
-determinable or exact, whereby we may appraise such of their
-criticisms as deal with the directly and wholly emotional art of
-acting. It is perhaps not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. William
-Archer’s father been murdered shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr.
-Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer would have been moved to believe
-Mr. Forbes-Robertson on even greater actor-artist than he believed him
-under the existing circumstances, or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius,
-the Danish journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a victim of
-syphilis when he reviewed August Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have
-looked on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive exponent of
-histrionism. Nothing is more æsthetically and artistically dubious
-and insecure than the appraisal of acting; for it is based upon the
-quicksands of varying human emotionalism, and of aural and visual
-prejudice. Were I, for example, one hundred times more proficient
-a critic of drama and life than I am, my criticism of acting would
-none the less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I would remain
-constitutionally anæsthetic to a Juliet, however otherwise talented,
-who had piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all his histrionic
-power, presented to the vision a pair of knock-knees. This, I well
-appreciate, is the kind of critical writing that is promptly set down
-as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as I am concerned and I daresay
-that it is, in one direction or another, the truth so far as the
-majority of critics are concerned.
-
-The most that may be said of the soundness of this or that laudatory
-criticism of an actor’s performance is that the performance in point
-has met exactly--or very nearly--the particular critic’s personal
-notion of how he, as a human being, would have cried, laughed and
-otherwise comported himself were he an actor and were he in the actor’s
-rôle. The opposite, or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds a
-similar truth. If this is not true, by what standards _can_ the critic
-estimate the actor’s performance? By the standards of the actors who
-have preceded this actor in the playing of the rôle, you say? What if
-the rôle is a new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has not been
-played before? Again, you say that the rôle may be in an alien drama
-and that the actor may be an alien, both rôle and performance being
-foreign to the emotional equipment of the critic. But basic emotions,
-the foundation of drama, are universal. Still again, what of such
-dramas as “Œdipus Rex,” what of such rôles--this with a triumphant
-chuckle on your part? I return the chuckle, and bid you read the
-criticisms that have been written of the actors who have played in
-these rôles! Invariably the actors have been treated in precisely the
-same terms and by the same standards as if they were playing, not in
-the drama of the fifth century before Christ, but in “Fedora,” “The
-Face in the Moonlight” or “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
-
-One cannot imagine sound criticism applying to any authentic art the
-standard of actor criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true enough,
-is always more or less personal, but, in its operation upon the
-authentic arts, its personality is ever like a new bottle into which
-the vintage wine of art has been poured. Criticism of the authentic
-arts is the result of the impact of a particular art upon a particular
-critical personality. Criticism of the dubious art of acting is the
-result of the impact of a particular critical personality upon this
-or that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely true, you
-inquire ironically, what of such an excellent instance of acting as
-Mimi Aguglia’s “Salome”; how in God’s name may the critic appraise that
-performance in the manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself were he
-a stage performer? Well, for all the surface humours of the question,
-that is actually more or less the way in which he does appraise it.
-The actor or actress, unlike the artist in more authentic fields,
-may never interpret emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the critic:
-the interpretation must be a reflection, more or less stereotyped,
-of the critic’s repertoire of emotions. Thus, where art is original
-expression, acting is merely the audible expression of a silent
-expression. In another phrase, expression in acting is predicated upon,
-and limited by, the expression of the critic. It is, therefore, a
-mere duplication of expression. And what holds true in the case of the
-critic so far as acting is concerned obviously holds doubly true in the
-case of the uncritical public.
-
-Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting, I come to the conclusion
-that the word “art” has almost uniformly been applied to acting by
-critics who, thinking that they had perhaps belaboured the subject a
-trifle too severely, were disposed graciously to throw it a sop. As
-good an illustration as any may be had from Lewes, certainly a friend
-of acting if ever there was one. Thus Lewes:
-
-  “The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an actor because we judge
-  only from the effect he produces, without inquiring too curiously
-  into the means. But, while the painter has nothing but his canvas and
-  the author has nothing but white paper and printers’ ink with which
-  to produce his effects, the actor has all other arts as handmaids;
-  the poet labours for him, creates his part, gives him his eloquence,
-  his music, his imagery, his tenderness, his pathos, his sublimity;
-  the scene-painter aids him; the costumes, the lights, the music, all
-  the fascination of the stage--all subserve the actor’s effects;
-  these raise him upon a pedestal; remove them, and what is he? He who
-  can make a stage mob bend and sway with his eloquence, what could he
-  do with a real mob, no poet by to prompt him? He who can charm us
-  with the stateliest imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the sables
-  of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can he do in coat and
-  trousers on the world’s stage? Rub off the paint, and the eyes are
-  no longer brilliant! Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value, and
-  then weigh him with the rivals whom he surpasses in reputation and
-  fortune.... If my estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower
-  than seems generally current, it is from no desire to disparage _an
-  art_ I have always loved; but, etc., etc.”
-
-You will find the same dido in most of the essays on acting: a
-protracted series of cuffs and slaps terminating in a gentle
-non-sequitur kiss.
-
-Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing hypnosis; it is not
-to be wondered at that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken
-it for a more exalted something than it intrinsically is. The flame
-and fire of a Duse, the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful
-stage sense of creation of a Moissi--these are not a little befuddling.
-And, under their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible that
-the critic should confound effect and cause. Yet acting, even of the
-highest order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain of a Hermann or
-a Kellar with a Shakespeare or a Molière as an assistant to hand over,
-as the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards or bowl of goldfish.
-It is trickery raised to its most exalted level: a combination of
-experience, intelligence and great charm, not revivifying something
-cold and dead, but releasing something quick and alive from the prison
-of the printed page.
-
-The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that he must
-experience within him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must
-actually persuade himself to feel his rôle with all its turning
-smiles and tears, speaks nonsense. So, too, must the auditor, yet who
-would term the auditor a creative artist? The actor who contends in
-favour of his creative art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit,
-a creative artist since he must theatrically create the dramatist’s
-moods, illusions and emotions without feeling them himself, also speaks
-nonsense. For so, too, in such a case as “Electra,” or “Ghosts,” or “No
-More Blondes,” must the auditor, yet who, again, would term the latter
-a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative
-art that two accomplished actors often “create” the same rôle in an
-entirely different manner, speaks nonsense yet again. For what is not
-creation in the first place does not become creation merely because it
-is multiplied by two. The actor who further contends in behalf of his
-creative art that if effective acting were the mere trickery that some
-maintain it to be, any person ordinarily gifted should be able, after a
-little experiment, to give an effective stage performance, speaks truer
-than he knows. Some of the most remarkable performances on the stage
-of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin have been given by just such persons.
-And there are numerous other instances. If acting is an art--and
-I do not say that it may not be--it at least, as an art, ill bears
-cross-examination of even the most superficial nature.
-
-
-III
-
-Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive echo of an art. It
-is drama’s exalted halloo come back to drama from the walls of the
-surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of acting too often mistakes
-the echo for the original voice. Although the analogy wears motley,
-criticism of this kind operates in much the same manner as if it were
-to contend that an approximately exact and beautiful Ben Ali Haggin
-_tableau vivant_ reproduction of, say, Velasquez’s “The Spinners,” was
-creative art in the sense that the original is creative art. Acting is
-to the art of the drama much what these so-called living pictures are
-to the art of painting. If acting is to be termed an art, it is, like
-the living picture, a freak art, an art with belladonna in its eyes and
-ever, even at its highest, a bit grotesque.
-
-In his defence of acting as an art equal to that of poetry and
-literature, Henry Irving has observed, “It has been said that acting
-is unworthy because it represents feigned emotions, but this censure
-would apply with equal force to poet or novelist.” But would it? The
-poet and the novelist may feign emotions, but it is their own active
-imaginations which feign them. The actor merely feigns passively the
-emotions which the imagination of the poet has actively feigned; if
-there is feigning, the actor merely parrots it. If there is feigned
-emotion in, say, the second stanza of Swinburne’s “Rococo,” and I
-mount an illuminated platform and recite the stanza very eloquently
-and impressively, am I precisely feigning the emotion of it or am I
-merely feigning the emotion that the great imagination of Swinburne has
-feigned? Feigned or unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come ready-made
-to the heart and lips of the actor.
-
-Continues Irving further: “It is the actor who gives body to
-the ideas of the highest dramatic literature--fire, force, and
-sensibility, without which they would remain for most people mere
-airy abstractions.” What one engages here is the peculiar logic that
-acting is an art since it popularizes dramatic literature and makes it
-intelligible to a majority of dunderheads!
-
-One more quotation from this actor’s defence, and we may pass on. “The
-actor’s work is absolutely concrete,” he challenges. “He is brought
-in every phase of his work into direct comparison with existing
-things.... Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he
-assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the
-spirit of the time in which the play is fixed. The free bearing of
-the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the
-seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless one
-of the nineteenth.... The voice must be modulated to the vogue of the
-time. The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age is different from
-that of a mail-clad one--nay, the armour of a period ruled in real life
-the poise and bearing of the body; and all this must be reproduced on
-the stage.... _It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the
-face of such manifold requirements that no Art is required for the
-representation of suitable action!_” The italics are those of one
-who experiences some difficulty in persuading himself that if Art is
-required for such things as these--dress, carriage, modulation of voice
-and carrying a sword--Art, strictly speaking, is no less required in
-the matter of going to a Quat’-z-Arts costume ball.
-
-Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not as art but as colourful
-and impressive artifice. Miss Margaret Anglin’s Joan of Arc is a
-more or less admirable example of acting not because it is art but
-because it is a shrewd, vivid and beguiling synthesis of various
-intrinsically spurious dodges: black tights to make stout Anglo-Saxon
-limbs appear Gallicly slender, a telescoping of words containing the
-sound of _s_ to conceal a personal defect in the structure of the
-upper lip, a manœuvring of the central action up stage to emphasize,
-through a familiar trick of the theatre, the sympathetic frailty of
-the character which the actress herself physically lacks, two intakes
-of breath before a shout of defiance that the effect of the ring of
-the directly antecedent shout on the part of one of the inquisitors
-may be diminished.... An effective acting performance is like a great
-explosion; and as T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in turn made
-from such nitrates as potassium nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn
-derived from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a great explosion
-of histrionism similarly made and derived from numerous--and not
-infrequently ludicrous and even vulgar--basic elements.
-
-The ill-balanced species of criticism which appraises an histrionic
-performance as art on the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it
-produces, with no inquiry into the means whereby that effect is
-produced, might analogously, were it to pursue this logic, appraise
-similarly as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist. And
-with logic perhaps much more sound. For if acting as an art is to be
-appraised in the degree of the effect it imparts to, and induces in,
-the auditor-spectator, surely--if there is any sense at all in such
-a method of estimate--may certain other such performances as I have
-suggested be similarly appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation of
-logic; whatever it may deal with--æsthetics, emotions, what not--it
-cannot remove itself entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr. John
-Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying the heart and mind
-of his auditor-spectator with some such character as Fedya and by
-suggesting directly that character’s tragic dégringolade, he can make
-the auditor-spectator pity and cry, so too an artist--by the rigid
-canon of æsthetic criticism--was Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who is said to
-have been able to do the same thing.
-
-What I attempt here is no facile paradox, but a _reductio ad absurdum_
-designed to show up the fallacy of the prevailing method of actor
-criticism. In criticism of the established arts, there is no such antic
-deportment. The critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz music
-with those of sound music, nor the stimulations of open melodrama
-with those of more profound drama. From each of these he receives
-stimulations of a kind: some superficial, some deep. But he inquires,
-in each instance, into the means whereby the various stimulations were
-vouchsafed to him. While he recognizes the fact that the sudden and
-unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Secret Service” produces in
-him a sensation of shock as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting
-off of a revolver in “Hedda Gabler,” he does not therefore promptly,
-and with no further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations are of
-an æsthetic piece. Nor does he assume that, since the nervous effect
-of the fall to death in “The Green Goddess” and of the fall to death
-in “The Master Builder” affect him immediately in much the same way,
-both sensations are accordingly produced by sound artistic means.
-Nor, yet again, does he confuse the quality--nor the springs of that
-quality--of the mood of wistful pathos with which “Poor Butterfly” and
-“Porgi, Amor” inspire him. But this confusion persists as part and
-parcel of the bulk of the criticism of acting. For one Hazlitt, or
-Lamb, or Lewes, or Anatole France who retains, or has retained, his
-clear discernment before the acted drama, there are, and have been, a
-number tenfold who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph with
-the wonders of Josef Haydn.
-
-
-
-
-V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM
-
-
-
-
-V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM
-
-
-I
-
-Arthur Bingham Walkley begins one of the best books ever written on
-the subject thus: “It is not to be gainsaid that the word criticism
-has gradually acquired a certain connotation of contempt.... Every
-one who expresses opinions, however imbecile, in print calls himself
-a ‘critic.’ The greater the ignoramus, the greater the likelihood of
-his posing as a ‘critic.’” An excellent book, as I have said, with a
-wealth of sharp talk in it, but Mr. Walkley seems to me to err somewhat
-in his preliminary assumption. Criticism has acquired a connotation
-of contempt less because it is practised by a majority of ignoramuses
-than because it is accepted at full face value by an infinitely greater
-majority of ignoramuses. It is not the mob that curls a lip--the mob
-accepts the lesser ignoramus at his own estimate of himself; it is the
-lonely and negligible minority man who, pausing musefully in the field
-that is the world, contemplates the jackasses eating the daisies.
-
-No man is so contemptuous of criticism as the well-stocked critic,
-just as there is no man so contemptuous of clothes as the man with
-the well-stocked wardrobe. It is as impossible to imagine a critic
-like Shaw not chuckling derisively at criticism as it is to imagine
-a regular subscriber to the _Weekly Review_ not swallowing it whole.
-The experienced critic, being on the inside, is in a position to look
-into the heads of the less experienced, and to see the wheels go round.
-He is privy to all their monkeyshines, since he is privy to his own.
-Having graduated from quackery, he now smilingly regards others still
-at the trade of seriously advancing sure cures for æsthetic baldness,
-cancer, acne and trifacial neuralgia. And while the yokels rub in
-the lotions and swallow the pills, he permits himself a small, but
-eminently sardonic, hiccup.
-
-It is commonly believed that the first virtue of a critic is honesty.
-As a matter of fact, in four cases out of five, honesty is the last
-virtue of a critic. As criticism is practised in America, honesty
-presents itself as the leading fault. There is altogether too much
-honesty. The greater the blockhead, the more honest he is. And as a
-consequence the criticism of these blockheads, founded upon their
-honest convictions, is worthless. There is some hope for an imbecile
-if he is dishonest, but none if he is resolute in sticking to his
-idiocies. If the average American critic were to cease writing what he
-honestly believes and dishonestly set down what he doesn’t believe, the
-bulk of the native criticism would gain some common sense and take on
-much of the sound value that it presently lacks. Honesty is a toy for
-first-rate men; when lesser men seek to play with it and lick off the
-paint, they come down with colic.
-
-It is further maintained that enthusiasm is a supplementary desideratum
-in a critic, that unless he is possessed of enthusiasm he cannot
-impart a warm love for fine things to his reader. Surely this, too,
-is nonsense. Enthusiasm is a virtue not in the critic, but in the
-critic’s reader. And such desired enthusiasm can be directly generated
-by enthusiasm no more than a glyceryl nitrate explosion can be
-generated by sulfuric acid. Enthusiasm may be made so contagious as to
-elect a man president of the United States or to raise an army large
-enough to win a world war, but it has never yet been made sufficiently
-contagious to persuade one American out of a hundred thousand that
-Michelangelo’s David of the Signoria is a better piece of work than
-the Barnard statue of Lincoln. Enthusiasm is an attribute of the
-uncritical, the defectively educated: stump speakers, clergymen, young
-girls, opera-goers, Socialists, Italians, such like. And not only an
-attribute, but a weapon. But the cultivated and experienced man has
-as little use for enthusiasm as for indignation. He appreciates that
-while it may convert a pack of ignoble doodles, it can’t convert any
-one worth converting. The latter must be persuaded, not inflamed. He
-realizes that where a double brass band playing “Columbia, the Gem
-of the Ocean” may leave a civilized Englishman cold to the virtues of
-the United States, proof that the United States has the best bathroom
-plumbing in the world may warm him up a bit. The sound critic is not a
-cheer leader, but a referee. Art is hot, criticism cold. Aristotle’s
-criticism of Euripides is as placid and reserved as Mr. William
-Archer’s criticism of the latest drama at the St. James’s Theatre;
-Brunetière is as calm over his likes as Mr. H. T. Parker of the Boston
-_Transcript_. There is no more enthusiasm in Lessing than there is
-indignation in Walkley. Hazlitt, at a hundred degrees emotional
-Fahrenheit, remains critically cool as a cucumber. To find enthusiasm,
-you will have to read the New York _Times_.
-
-Enthusiasm, in short, is the endowment of immaturity. The greater the
-critic, the greater his disinclination to communicate æsthetic heat.
-Such communication savours of propaganda and, however worthy that
-propaganda, he will have naught to do with its trafficking. If the
-ability to possess and communicate enthusiasm is the mark of the true
-critic, then the theatrical page of the New York _Journal_ is the
-greatest critical literature in America.
-
-A third contention has it that aloofness and detachment are no less
-valuable to the dramatic critic than honesty and enthusiasm. Unless I
-am seriously mistaken, also bosh. Dramatic criticism is fundamentally
-the critic’s art of appraising himself in terms of various forms of
-drama. Or, as I some time ago put it, the only sound dramatic critic is
-the one who reports less the impression that this or that play makes
-upon him than the impression he makes upon this or that play. Of all
-the forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is essentially, and perhaps
-correctly, the most personal. Tell me what a dramatic critic eats and
-drinks, how far north of Ninetieth Street he lives, what he considers
-a pleasant evening when he is not in the theatre, and what kind of
-lingerie his wife wears, and I’ll tell you with very few misses what
-kind of critic he is. I’ll tell you whether he is fit to appreciate
-Schnitzler, or whether he is fit only for Augustus Thomas. I’ll tell
-you in advance what he will think about, and how he will react to,
-Hauptmann, Sacha Guitry or George V. Hobart. I’ll tell you whether
-he is the sort that makes a great to-do when his eagle eye spots Sir
-Nigel Waterhouse, M.P., in Act II fingering a copy of the Philadelphia
-_Public Ledger_ instead of the London _Times_, and whether he is the
-sort that writes “Mr. John Cort has staged the play in his customary
-lavish manner” when the rise of the curtain discloses to him a room
-elaborately decorated in the latest Macy mode. To talk about the value
-of detachment in a dramatic critic is to talk about the value of
-detachment in a Swiss mountain guide. The criticism is the man; the man
-the criticism.
-
-Of all forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is the most purely
-biological. Were the genii to put the mind of Max Beerbohm into the
-head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse, and vice versa, their criticisms would
-still remain exactly as they are. But, on the contrary, were the head
-of Mr. J. Ranken Towse to be placed on the body of Max Beerbohm, and
-vice versa, their criticisms would take on points of view diametrically
-opposed to their present. Max would begin admiring the Rev. Dr. Charles
-Rann Kennedy and Towse would promptly proceed to put on his glasses
-to get a better view of the girl on the end. Every book of dramatic
-criticism--every single piece of dramatic criticism--is a searching,
-illuminating autobiography. The dramatic critic performs a clinic
-upon himself every time he takes his pen in his hand. He may try, as
-Walkley puts it, to substitute for the capital I’s “nouns of multitude
-signifying many,” or some of those well-worn stereotypes--“It is
-thought,” “one may be pardoned for hinting,” “will any one deny?” etc.,
-etc.--by which criticism keeps up the pretence that it is not a man but
-a corporation, but he fools no one.
-
-To ask the dramatic critic to keep himself out of his criticism,
-to detach himself, is thus a trifle like asking an actor to keep
-himself out of his rôle. Dramatic critics and actors are much alike.
-The only essential difference is that the actor does his acting on a
-platform. But, platform or no platform, the actor and the dramatic
-critic best serve their rôles when they filter them through their own
-personalities. A dramatic critic who is told to keep his personality
-out of his criticism is in the position of an actor who, being
-physically and temperamentally like Mr. John Barrymore, is peremptorily
-directed by a producer to stick a sofa pillow under his belt, put on
-six extra heel-lifts, acquire a whiskey voice and play Falstaff like
-the late Sir Herbert Tree. The best dramatic critics from the time of
-Quintus Horatius Flaccus (_vide_ the “Epistola”) have sunk their vivid
-personalities into their work right up to the knees. Not only have they
-described the adventures of their souls among masterpieces, but the
-adventures of their kidneys, spleens and _cæca_ as well. Each has held
-the mirror of drama up to his own nature, with all its idiosyncrasies.
-And in it have been sharply reflected not the cut and dried features
-of the professor, but the vital features of a red-alive man. The other
-critics have merely held up the mirror to these red-alive men, and have
-reflected not themselves but the latter. Then, in their vainglory, they
-have looked again into the hand-glass and have mistaken the reflection
-of the parrot for an eagle.
-
-A third rubber-stamp: the critic must have sympathy. As properly
-contend that a surgeon must have sympathy. The word is misused. What
-the critic must have is not sympathy, which in its common usage
-bespeaks a measure of sentimental concern, but interest. If a dramatic
-critic, for example, has sympathy for an actress he can no more
-criticize her with poise than a surgeon can operate on his own wife.
-The critic may on occasion have sympathy as the judge in a court of law
-may on occasion have it, but if he is a fair critic, or a fair judge,
-he can’t do anything about it, however much he would like to. Between
-the fair defendant in the lace baby collar and a soft heart, Article
-X, Section 123, Page 416, absurdly interposes itself. (In example,
-being a human being with a human being’s weaknesses before a critic, I
-would often rather praise a lovely one when she is bad than an unlovely
-one when she is good--and, alas, I fear that I sometimes do--but in
-the general run I try to remember my business and behave myself. It
-isn’t always easy. But I do my best, and angels and Lewes could do no
-more.) The word sympathy is further mishandled, as in the similar case
-of the word enthusiasm. What a critic should have is not, as is common,
-sympathy and enthusiasm _before_ the fact, but _after_ it. The critic
-who enters a theatre bubblingly certain that he is going to have a good
-time is no critic. The critic is he who leaves a theatre cheerfully
-certain that he _has_ had a good time. Sympathy and enthusiasm, unless
-they are _ex post facto_, are precisely like prevenient prejudice and
-hostility. Sympathy has no more preliminary place in the equipment of a
-critic than in the equipment of an ambulance driver or a manufacturer
-of bird cages. It is the caboose of criticism, not the engine.
-
-The trouble with dramatic criticism in America, speaking generally,
-is that where it is not frankly reportorial it too often seeks to
-exhibit a personality when there exists no personality to exhibit.
-Himself perhaps conscious of this lack, the critic indulges in heroic
-makeshifts to inject into his writings a note of individuality, and the
-only individuality that comes out of his perspirations is of a piece
-with that of the bearded lady or the dog-faced boy. Individuality of
-this freak species is the bane of the native criticism. The college
-professor who, having nothing to say, tries to give his criticism
-an august air by figuratively attaching to it a pair of whiskers
-and horn glasses, the suburban college professor who sedulously
-practises an aloofness from the madding crowd that his soul longs
-to be part of, the college professor who postures as a man of the
-world, the newspaper reporter who postures as a college professor, the
-journalist who performs in terms of Art between the Saks and Gimbel
-advertisements--these and others like them are the sad comedians in
-the tragical crew. In their heavy attempts to live up to their fancy
-dress costumes, in their laborious efforts to conceal their humdrum
-personalities in the uncomfortable gauds of Petruchio and Gobbo, they
-betray themselves even to the bus boys. The same performer cannot
-occupy the rôles of Polonius and Hamlet, even in a tank town troupe.
-
-No less damaging to American dramatic criticism is the dominant
-notion that criticism, to be valuable, must be constructive. That
-is, that it must, as the phrase has it, “build up” rather than “tear
-down.” As a result of this conviction we have an endless repertoire
-of architectonic advice from critics wholly without the structural
-faculty, advice which, were it followed, would produce a drama twice
-as poor as that which they criticize. Obsessed with the idea that they
-must be constructive, the critics know no lengths to which they will
-not go in their sweat to dredge up cures of one sort or another. They
-constructively point out that Shaw’s plays would be better plays if
-Shaw understood the punctual technique of Pinero, thus destroying a
-“Cæsar and Cleopatra” to construct a “Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” They
-constructively point out the trashy aspect of some Samuel Shipman’s
-“Friendly Enemies,” suggest more serious enterprises to him, and get
-the poor soul to write a “The Unwritten Chapter” which is ten times as
-bad. They are not content to be critics; they must also be playwrights.
-They stand in mortal fear of the old recrimination, “He who can, does;
-he who can’t, criticizes,” not pausing to realize that the names of
-Mr. Octavus Roy Cohen and Matthew Arnold may be taken as somewhat
-confounding respective examples. They note with some irritation that
-the critic for the Wentzville, Mo., _Beacon_ is a destructive critic,
-but are conveniently ignorant of the fact--which may conceivably prove
-something more--that so was George Farquhar. If destructive criticism,
-in their meaning, is criticism which pulls down without building up in
-return, three-fourths of the best dramatic criticism written since
-the time of Boileau, fully filling the definition, is worthless. One
-can’t cure a yellow fever patient by pointing out to him that he should
-have caught the measles. One can’t improve the sanitary condition of a
-neighbourhood merely by giving the outhouse a different coat of paint.
-The foe of destructive criticism is the pro-German of American art.
-
-Our native criticism suffers further from the commercial Puritanism of
-its mediums. What is often mistaken for the Puritanism of the critic
-is actually the commercial Puritanism forced upon him by the owner and
-publisher of the journal in which his writings appear, and upon which
-he has to depend for a livelihood. Although this owner and publisher
-is often not personally the Puritan, he is yet shrewdly aware that
-the readers of his journal are, and out of this awareness he becomes
-what may be termed a circulation blue-nose. Since circulation and
-advertising revenue are twins, he must see to it that the sensibilities
-of the former are not offended. And his circumspection, conveyed to
-the critic by the copy reader or perhaps only sensed, brings about the
-Puritan play-acting by the critic. This accounts to no little degree
-for the hostile and uncritical reviews of even the most finished risqué
-farces, and of the best efforts of American and European playwrights
-to depict truthfully and fairly the more unpleasant phases of sex.
-“I agree with you that this last naughty farce of Avery Hopwood’s is
-awfully funny stuff,” a New York newspaper reviewer once said to me;
-“I laughed at it until my ribs ached; but I don’t dare write as much.
-One can’t praise such things in a paper with the kind of circulation
-that ours has.” It is criticism bred from this commercial Puritanism
-that has held back farce writing in America, and I venture to say much
-serious dramatic writing as well. The best farce of a Guitry or a
-Dieudonné, produced in America today without childish excisions, would
-receive unfavourable notices from nine newspapers out of ten. The best
-sex drama of a Porto-Riche or a Wedekind would suffer--indeed, already
-has suffered--a similar fate. I predicted to Eugene O’Neill, the moment
-I laid down the manuscript of his pathological play “Diff’rent,” the
-exact manner in which, two months later, the axes fell upon him.
-
-For one critic like Mr. J. Ranken Towse who is a Puritan by tradition
-and training, there are a dozen who are Puritans by proxy. One can
-no more imagine a dramatic critic on a newspaper owned by Mr. Cyrus
-H. K. Curtis praising Schnitzler’s “Reigen” or Rip’s and Gignoux’s
-“Scandale de Deauville” than one can imagine the same critic denouncing
-“Ben Hur.” What thus holds true in journalistic criticism holds true
-in precisely the same way in the criticism written by the majority
-of college professors. I doubt that there is a college professor in
-America today who, however much he admired a gay, reprobate farce like
-“Le Rubicon” or “L’Illusioniste,” would dare state his admiration in
-print. Puritan or no Puritan, it is professionally necessary for him to
-comport himself as one. His university demands it, silently, sternly,
-idiotically. He is the helpless victim of its æsthetic Ku Klux. Behind
-any drama dealing unconventionally with sex, there hovers a spectre
-that vaguely resembles Professor Scott Nearing. He sees it ... he
-reflects ... he works up a safe indignation.
-
-Dramatic criticism travels, in America, carefully laid tracks. Signal
-lights, semaphores and one-legged old men with red flags are stationed
-along the way to protect it at the crossings, to make it safe, and
-to guard it from danger. It elaborately steams, pulls, puffs, chugs,
-toots, whistles, grinds and rumbles for three hundred miles--and
-brings up at something like Hinkletown, Pa. It is eager, but futile.
-It is honest, but so is Dr. Frank Crane. It is fearless, but so is the
-actor who plays the hero strapped to the papier-mâché buzz-saw. It is
-constructive, but so is an embalmer. It is detached, but so is a man in
-the Fiji Islands. It is sympathetic, but so is a quack prostatitician.
-
-
-
-
-VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA
-
-
-
-
-VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA
-
-
-I
-
-Dramatic criticism, at its best, is the adventure of an intelligence
-among emotions. The chief end of drama is the enkindling of emotions;
-the chief end of dramatic criticism is to rush into the burning
-building and rescue the metaphysical weaklings who are wont to be
-overcome by the first faint whiffs of smoke.
-
-Dramatic criticism, in its common run, fails by virtue of its confusion
-of unschooled emotion with experienced emotion. A dramatic critic who
-has never been kissed may properly appreciate the readily assimilable
-glories of “Romeo and Juliet,” but it is doubtful that he will be
-able properly to appreciate the somewhat more evasive splendours of
-“Liebelei.” The capability of a judge does not, of course, depend
-upon his having himself once been in jail, nor does the capability
-of a critic depend upon his having personally once experienced the
-emotions of the dramatis personæ, but that critic is nevertheless the
-most competent whose emotions the dramatis personæ do not so much
-anticipatorily stir up as recollectively soothe.
-
-All criticism is more or less a statement in terms of the present
-of what one has viewed of the past through a delicate, modern
-reducing-glass. Intelligence is made up, in large part, of dead
-emotions; ignorance, of emotions that have lived on, deaf and dumb
-and crippled, but ever smiling. The general admission that a dramatic
-critic must be experienced in drama, literature, acting and theories
-of production but not necessarily in emotions is somewhat difficult of
-digestion. Such a critic may conceivably comprehend much of Sheridan,
-Molière, Bernhardt and Yevreynoff, but a hundred searching and
-admirable things like the beginning of “Anatol,” the middle of “Lonely
-Lives” and the end of “The Case of Rebellious Susan” must inevitably
-be without his ken, and baffle his efforts at sound penetration. I
-do not here posture myself as one magnificently privy to all the
-mysteries, but rather as one who, failing perhaps to be on very
-intimate terms with them, detects and laments the deficiencies that
-confound him. Experience, goeth the saw, is a wise master. But it is,
-for the critic, an even wiser slave. A critic on the Marseilles _Petits
-Pois_ may critically admire “La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan,” but it
-takes an Anatole France critically to understand it.
-
-The superficial quality of American emotions, sociological and
-æsthetic, enjoyed by the great majority of American critics, operates
-extensively against profundity in American criticism--in that of
-literature and music no less than that of drama. American emotions,
-speaking in the mass, where they are not the fixed and obvious emotions
-ingenerate in most countries--such as love of home, family and country,
-and so on--are one-syllable emotions, primary-colour emotions. The
-polysyllabic and pastel emotions are looked on as dubious, even
-degenerate. No man, for example, who, though absolutely faithful to
-his wife, confessed openly that he had winked an eye at a ballet girl
-could conceivably be elected to membership in the Union League Club.
-The man who, after a cocktail, indiscreetly gave away the news that he
-had felt a tear of joy in his eye when he heard the minuet of Mozart’s
-G minor symphony or a tear of sadness when he looked upon Corot’s “La
-Solitude,” would be promptly set down by the other members of the golf
-club as a dipsomaniac who was doubtless taking narcotics on the side.
-If a member of the Y. M. C. A. were to glance out of the window and
-suddenly ejaculate, “My, what a beautiful girl!” the superintendent
-would immediately grab him by the seat of the pantaloons and throw him
-down the back stairs. And if a member of the American Legion were to
-sniffle so much as once when the orchestra in the Luna Park dance hall
-played “Wiener Blut,” a spy would seize him by the ear and hurry him
-before the heads of the organization as a suspicious fellow, in all
-probability of German blood.
-
-The American is either ashamed of honest emotion or, if he is not
-ashamed, is soon shamed into shame by his neighbours. He is profoundly
-affected by any allusion to Mother, the Baby, or the Flag--the
-invincible trinity of American dramatic hokum--and his reactions
-thereto meet with the full favour of church and state; but he is
-unmoved, he is silently forbidden to be moved, by a love that doesn’t
-happen to fall into the proper pigeon-hole, by a work of great beauty
-that doesn’t happen to preach a backwoods Methodist sermon, by sheer
-loveliness, or majesty, or unadorned truth. And this corsetted emotion,
-mincing, wasp-waisted and furtive, colours all native criticism.
-It makes the dramatic critic ashamed of simple beauty, and forbids
-him honestly to admire the mere loveliness of such exhibitions
-as Ziegfeld’s. It makes him ashamed of passion, and forbids him
-honestly to admire such excellent dramas as Georges de Porto-Riche’s
-“Amoureuse.” It makes him ashamed of laughter, and forbids him to
-chuckle at the little naughtinesses of Sacha Guitry and his own Avery
-Hopwood. It makes him ashamed of truth, and forbids him to regard with
-approbation such a play as “The Only Law.” The American drama must
-therefore not create new emotions for him, but must hold the battered
-old mirror up to his own. It must warm him not with new, splendid and
-worldly emotions, but must satisfy him afresh as to the integrity and
-higher merit of his own restricted parcel of emotions. It must abandon
-all new, free concepts of love and life, of romance and adventure and
-glory, and must reassure him--with appropriate quiver-music--that the
-road to heaven is up Main Street and the road to hell down the Avenue
-de l’Opéra.
-
-Though there is a regrettable trace of snobbery in the statement,
-it yet remains that--with half a dozen or so quickly recognizable
-exceptions--the practitioners of dramatic criticism in America
-are in the main a humbly-born, underpaid and dowdy-lived lot.
-This was as true of them yesterday as it is today. And as Harlem,
-delicatessen-store dinners, napkin-rings and the Subway are not,
-perhaps, best conducive to a polished and suavely cosmopolitan
-outlook on life and romance and enthralling beauty, we have had
-a dramatic criticism pervaded by a vainglorious homeliness, by a
-side-street æsthetic, and by not a little of the difficultly suppressed
-rancour that human nature ever feels in the presence of admired yet
-unachievable situations. Up to fifteen years ago, drama in America
-was compelled critically to meet with, and adhere strictly to, the
-standards of life, culture and romance as they obtained over on Mr.
-William Winter’s Staten Island. Since Winter’s death, it has been
-urged critically to abandon the standards of Staten Island and comply
-instead with the eminently more sophisticated standards derived from
-a four years’ study of Cicero, Stumpf and the Norwegian system of
-communal elections at Harvard or Catawba College, combined with a two
-weeks’ stay in Paris. For twenty years, Ibsen and Pinero suffered the
-American critical scourge because they had not been born and brought
-up in a town with a bust of Cotton Mather or William Cullen Bryant in
-its public square, and did not think quite the same way about things
-as Horace Greeley. For twenty years more, Porto-Riche and Frenchmen
-like him will doubtless suffer similarly because, in a given situation,
-they do not act precisely as Mr. Frank A. Munsey or Dr. Stuart Pratt
-Sherman would; for twenty years more, Hauptmann and other Germans will
-doubtless be viewed with a certain measure of condescension because
-they have not enjoyed the same advantages as Professor Brander Matthews
-in buying Liberty Bonds, at par.
-
-American dramatic criticism is, and always has been, essentially
-provincial. It began by mistaking any cheap melodrama like “The Charity
-Ball” or “The Wife” which was camouflaged with a few pots of palms and
-half a dozen dress suits for a study of American society. It progressed
-by appraising as the dean of American dramatists and as the leading
-American dramatic thinker a playwright who wrote such stuff as “All
-over this great land thousands of trains run every day, starting and
-arriving in punctual agreement because this is a woman’s world! The
-great steamships, dependable almost as the sun--a million factories in
-civilization--the countless looms and lathes of industry--the legions
-of labour that weave the riches of the world--all--all move by the
-mainspring of man’s faith in woman!” It has come to flower today in
-denouncing what the best European critics have proclaimed to be the
-finest example of American fantastic comedy on the profound ground that
-“it is alien to American morality,” and in hailing as one of the most
-acute studies of a certain typical phase of American life a comedy
-filched substantially from the French.
-
-The plush-covered provincialism of the native dramatic criticism,
-operating in this wise against conscientious drama and sound
-appreciation of conscientious drama, constantly betrays itself for
-all the chintz hocus-pocus with which it seeks drolly to conceal
-that provincialism. For all its easy incorporation of French phrases
-laboriously culled from the back of Webster, its casually injected
-allusions to the Überbrett’l, Stanislav Pshibuishevsky, the excellent
-_cuissot de Chevreuil sauce poivrade_ to be had in the little
-restaurant near the comfort station in the Place Pigalle, and the
-bewitching eyes of the prima ballerina in the 1917 Y. M. C. A. show
-at Epernay, it lets its mask fall whenever it is confronted in the
-realistic flesh by one or another of the very things against which
-it has postured its cosmopolitanism. Thus does the mask fall, and
-reveal the old pair of suburban eyes, before the “indelicacy” of
-French dramatic masterpieces, before the “polished wit” of British
-polished witlessness, before the “stodginess” of the German master
-depictions of stodgy German peasantry, before the “gloom” of Russian
-dramatic photography, before the “sordidness” of “Countess Julie” and
-the “wholesomeness” of “The Old Homestead.” Cosmopolitanism is a
-heritage, not an acquisition. It may be born to a man in a wooden shack
-in Hardin County, in Kentucky, or in a little cottage in Hampshire in
-England, or in a garret of Paris, but, unless it is so born to him, a
-thousand Cunard liners and Orient Expresses cannot bring it to him. All
-criticism is geography of the mind and geometry of the heart. American
-criticism suffers in that what æsthetic wanderlust its mind experiences
-is confined to excursion trips, and in that what _x_ its heart seeks to
-discover is an unknown quantity only to emotional sub-freshmen.
-
-Criticism is personal, or it is nothing. Talk to me of impersonal
-criticism, and I’ll talk to you of impersonal sitz-bathing. Impersonal
-criticism is the dodge of the critic without personality. Some men
-marry their brother’s widow; some earn a livelihood imitating George
-M. Cohan; some write impersonal criticism. Show me how I can soundly
-criticize Mrs. Fiske as Hannele without commenting on the mature aspect
-of the lady’s _stentopgia_, and I shall begin to believe that there
-may be something in the impersonal theory. Show me how I can soundly
-criticize the drama of Wedekind without analyzing Wedekind, the man,
-and I shall believe in the theory to the full. It is maintained by the
-apostles of the theory that the dramatic critic is in the position
-of a judge in the court of law: that his concern, like that of the
-latter, is merely with the evidence presented to him, not with the
-personalities of those who submit the evidence. Nothing could be more
-idiotic. The judge who does not take into consideration, for example,
-that--whatever the nature of the evidence--the average Italian, or
-negro, or Armenian before him is in all probability lying like the
-devil is no more equipped to be a sound judge than the dramatic critic
-who, for all the stage evidence, fails to take into consideration that
-Strindberg personally was a lunatic, that Pinero, while treating of
-British impulses and character, is himself of ineradicable Portuguese
-mind and blood, that the inspiration of D’Annunzio came not from a
-woman out of life but from a woman out of the greenroom, and that Shaw
-is a legal virgin.
-
-Just as dramatic criticism, as it is practised in America, is Mason-jar
-criticism--criticism, that is, obsessed by a fixed determination to put
-each thing it encounters into an air-tight bottle and to label it--so
-is this dramatic criticism itself in turn subjected to the bottling
-and labelling process. A piece of criticism, however penetrating, that
-is not couched in the language of the commencement address of the
-president of Millsaps College, and that fails to include a mention of
-the Elizabethan theatre and a quotation from Victor Hugo’s “Hernani,”
-is labelled “journalistic.” A criticism that elects to make its points
-with humour rather than without humour is labelled “flippant.” A
-criticism that shows a wide knowledge of everything but the subject
-in hand is labelled “scholarly.” One that, however empty, prefixes
-every name with a Mr. and somewhere in it discloses the fact that the
-critic is sixty-five years old is labelled “dignified.” One that is
-full of hard common sense from beginning to end but is guilty of wit
-is derogatorily labelled “an imitation of Bernard Shaw.” One that says
-an utterly worthless play is an utterly worthless play, and then shuts
-up, is labelled “destructive”; while one that points out that the same
-play would be a much better play if Hauptmann or De Curel had written
-it is labelled “constructive and informing.” And so it goes. With the
-result that dramatic criticism in America is a dead art language. Like
-Mr. William Jennings Bryan, it has been criticized to death.
-
-The American mania for being on the popular side has wrapped its
-tentacles around the American criticism of the theatre. The American
-critic, either because his job depends upon it or because he
-appreciates that _kudos_ in this country, as in no other, is a gift
-of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep, he seeks the comfortable
-support of other sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a guaranteed pay
-envelope at the end of the week, dignity in the eyes of the community,
-an eventual election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters
-and, when he reaches three score years and ten and his trousers have
-become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century Theatre with a bill
-made up of all the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes
-upon whom he has lavished praise. This, in America, is the respected
-critic. If we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley, or a Boissard,
-or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab, he would be regarded as not quite nice.
-Certainly the Drama League would not invite him to appear before it.
-Certainly he would never be invited to sit between Prof. Richard
-Burton and Prof. William Lyon Phelps at the gala banquet to Mr. D.
-W. Griffith. Certainly, if his writings got into the paid prints at
-all, there would be a discreet editor’s note at the top to the effect
-that “the publication of an article does not necessarily imply that it
-represents the ideas of this publication or of its editors.”
-
-Criticism in America must follow the bell-cow. The bell-cow is personal
-cowardice, artistic cowardice, neighbourhood cowardice, or the even
-cheaper cowardice of the daily and--to a much lesser degree--periodical
-press. Up to within a few years ago it was out of the question for
-a dramatic critic to write honestly of the productions of David
-Belasco and still keep his job. One of the leading New York evening
-newspapers peremptorily discharged its reviewer for daring to do so;
-another New York newspaper sternly instructed its reviewer not to
-make the same mistake twice under the penalty of being cashiered; a
-leading periodical packed off its reviewer for the offence. One of
-the most talented critics in New York was several years ago summarily
-discharged by the newspaper that employed him because he wrote an
-honest criticism of a very bad play by an obscure playwright named
-Jules Eckert Goodman. Another conscientious critic, daring mob opinion
-at about the same time--he wrote, as I recall, something to the effect
-that the late Charles Frohman’s productions were often very shoddy
-things--was charily transferred the next day to another post on the
-newspaper’s staff. I myself, ploughing my familiar modest critical
-course, have, indeed, been made not personally unaware of the native
-editorial horror of critical opinions which are not shared by the Night
-School curricula, the inmates of the Actors’ Home, the Independent
-Order of B’nai B’rith, the United Commercial Travelers of America, and
-the Moose. Some years ago, a criticism of Hall Caine and of his play
-“Margaret Schiller,” which ventured the opinion that the M. Caine was
-perhaps not one of the greatest of modern geniuses, so frightened the
-editors of the Philadelphia _North American_ and the Cleveland _Leader_
-that I doubt they have yet recovered from the fear of the consequences
-of printing the review.
-
-The ruling ethic of the American press so far as the theatre is
-concerned is one of unctuous _laissez faire_. “If you can’t praise,
-don’t dispraise,” is the editorial injunction to the reviewer. The
-theatre in America is a great business--greater even than the
-department store--and a great business should be treated with proper
-respect. What if the reviewer does not admire “The Key to Heaven”? It
-played to more than _twelve thousand dollars_ last week; it _must_
-be good. The theatre must be helped, and the way to help it is
-uninterruptedly to speak well of it. Fine drama? Art? A newspaper has
-no concern with fine drama and art; the public is not interested in
-such things. A newspaper’s concern is primarily with news. But is not
-dramatic swindling, the selling of spurious wares at high prices, news?
-Is not an attempt to corrupt the future of the theatre as an honourable
-institution and an honourable business also news, news not so very
-much less interesting, perhaps, than the three column account of an
-ex-Follies girl’s adulteries? The reviewer, for his impertinence, is
-assigned henceforth to cover the Jefferson Market police court.
-
-The key-note of the American journalistic attitude toward the theatre
-is a stagnant optimism. Dramatic art and the red-haired copy boy are
-the two stock jokes of the American newspaper office. Here and there
-one encounters a reviewer who, through either the forcefulness or
-the amiability of his personality, is successful for a short time in
-evading the editorial shackles--there are a few such still extant
-as I write. But soon or late the rattle of the chains is heard and
-the reviewer that was is no more. He is an American, and must suffer
-the penalty that an American who aspires to cultured viewpoint and
-defiant love of beauty must ever suffer. For--so George Santayana,
-late professor of philosophy in Harvard University, in “Character and
-Opinion in the United States”--“the luckless American who is drawn
-to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless
-has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform,
-and prosperity dinned into his ears: every door is open in this
-direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart
-and withers in a corner--in remote places you sometimes find such a
-solitary gaunt idealist--or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or
-Montmartre to save his soul--or perhaps not to save it.”
-
-
-
-
-      *      *      *      *      *      *
-
-
-
-
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-<h1 class="pgx" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Critic and the Drama, by George Jean
-Nathan</h1>
-<p>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
-and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
-restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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-located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the
-country where you are located before using this ebook.</p>
-<p>Title: The Critic and the Drama</p>
-<p>Author: George Jean Nathan</p>
-<p>Release Date: September 12, 2020  [eBook #63188]</p>
-<p>Language: English</p>
-<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
-<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA***</p>
-<p>&nbsp;</p>
-<h4 class="pgx" title="">E-text prepared by David E. Brown<br />
-    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
-    (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net">http://www.pgdp.net</a>)<br />
-    from page images generously made available by<br />
-    Internet Archive<br />
-    (<a href="https://archive.org">https://archive.org</a>)</h4>
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-  <tr>
-    <td valign="top">
-      Note:
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-      Images of the original pages are available through
-      Internet Archive. See
-      <a href="https://archive.org/details/criticdrama00nath">
-      https://archive.org/details/criticdrama00nath</a>
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-
-<h1>THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA</h1>
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<p class="center"><span class="u"><span class="large"><i>THE BOOKS OF GEORGE JEAN NATHAN</i></span></span></p>
-</div>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="center"><i>The Theatre</i></div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">COMEDIANS ALL</div>
-<div class="verse">THE POPULAR THEATRE</div>
-<div class="verse">MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS</div>
-<div class="verse">ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE</div>
-<div class="verse">THE THEATRE, THE DRAMA, THE GIRLS</div>
-<div class="verse">THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="center"><i>Satire</i></div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE</div>
-<div class="verse">BOTTOMS UP</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="center"><i>Plays</i></div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">THE ETERNAL MYSTERY</div>
-<div class="verse">HELIOGABALUS (<i>in collaboration with H. L. Mencken</i>)</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="center"><i>Philosophy</i></div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">THE AMERICAN CREDO: A CONTRIBUTION TOWARD</div>
-<div class="indent">THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NATIONAL MIND</div>
-<div class="indent">(<i>in collaboration with H. L. Mencken</i>)</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="center"><i>Travel and Reminiscence</i></div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">EUROPE AFTER 8:15 (<i>in collaboration with H. L. Mencken</i>)</div>
-</div></div></div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter">
-<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="" /></div></div>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-<div class="titlepage">
-
-<p><span class="xxlarge">THE &middot; CRITIC &middot; AND<br />
-THE &middot; DRAMA</span></p>
-
-<p><span class="xlarge">BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN</span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="" /></div>
-
-<p>New York<span class="gap"><span class="large">ALFRED &middot; A &middot; KNOPF</span></span><span class="gap">Mcmxxii</span></p>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY<br />
-ALFRED A. KNOPF, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br />
-<br />
-<i>Published January, 1922</i><br />
-<br />
-<br />
-<i>Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.<br />
-Paper (Warren&#8217;s) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr &amp; Sons, New York, N. Y.<br />
-Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.</i></p>
-
-
-<p class="center">MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-
-<p class="center">
-WITH HIS PERMISSION<br />
-<span class="smcap">To</span> EDWARD GORDON CRAIG<br />
-THE FIRST &AElig;STHETICIAN OF THE THEATRE</p>
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<h2 class="nobreak">CONTENTS</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-
-<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" summary="table">
-
-<tr><td class="tdr"><span class="small">CHAPTER</span></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="tdr">I.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Aesthetic Jurisprudence</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_3">      3</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="tdr">II.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Drama as an Art</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_29">     29</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="tdr">III.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The Place of the Theatre</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">      63</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="tdr">IV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The Place of Acting</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_83">      83</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="tdr">V.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Dramatic Criticism</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_113">      113</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="tdr">VI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Dramatic Criticism in America &nbsp; &nbsp; </span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_133">       133</a></td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<p><i>Of all the arts and half-arts&mdash;perhaps
-even above that of acting&mdash;is the art of
-criticism founded most greatly upon
-vanity. All criticism is, at bottom, an
-effort on the part of its practitioner to
-show off himself and his art at the expense
-of the artist and the art which he
-criticizes. The heavy modesty practised
-by certain critics is but a recognition of,
-and self-conscious attempt to diminish,
-the fundamental and ineradicable vainglory
-of criticism. The great critics are
-those who, recognizing the intrinsic, permanent
-and indeclinable egotism of the
-critical art, make no senseless effort to
-conceal it. The absurd critics are those
-who attempt to conceal it and, in the
-attempt, make their art and themselves
-doubly absurd.</i></p></div>
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1"></a>[1]</span>
-<p class="ph2">I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE</p>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2"></a>[2]</span></p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span>
-<h2 class="nobreak">I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p class="drop-cap2">ART is a reaching out into the ugliness
-of the world for vagrant beauty and
-the imprisoning of it in a tangible
-dream. Criticism is the dream book. All art
-is a kind of subconscious madness expressed in
-terms of sanity; criticism is essential to the
-interpretation of its mysteries, for about
-everything truly beautiful there is ever something
-mysterious and disconcerting. Beauty
-is not always immediately recognizable as
-beauty; what often passes for beauty is mere
-infatuation; living beauty is like a love that
-has outlasted the middle-years of life, and has
-met triumphantly the test of time, and faith,
-and cynic meditation. For beauty is a sleep-walker
-in the endless corridors of the wakeful
-world, uncertain, groping, and not a little
-strange. And criticism is its tender guide.</p>
-
-<p>Art is a partnership between the artist and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span>
-the artist-critic. The former creates; the
-latter re-creates. Without criticism, art
-would of course still be art, and so with its
-windows walled in and with its lights extinguished
-would the Louvre still be the Louvre.
-Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of
-art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in
-which art might otherwise rest only vaguely
-discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.</p>
-
-<p>Criticism, at its best, is a great, tall candle
-on the altar of art; at its worst, which is to say
-in its general run, a campaign torch flaring red
-in behalf of &#230;sthetic ward-heelers. This campaign
-torch motif in criticism, with its
-drunken enthusiasm and raucous hollering
-born of ignorance, together with what may be
-called the Prince Albert motif, with its sober,
-statue-like reserve born of ignorance that, being
-well-mannered, is not so bumptious as the
-other, has contributed largely to the common
-estimate of criticism as a profession but
-slightly more exalted than Second Avenue
-auctioneering if somewhat less than Fifth.
-Yet criticism is itself an art. It might,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span>
-indeed, be well defined as an art within an art,
-since every work of art is the result of a struggle
-between the heart that is the artist himself
-and his mind that is the critic. Once his work
-is done, the artist&#8217;s mind, tired from the bitterness
-of the struggle, takes the form of a second
-artist, puts on this second artist&#8217;s strange hat,
-coat and checkered trousers, and goes forth
-with refreshed vigour to gossip abroad how
-much of the first artist&#8217;s work was the result
-of its original splendid vitality and how much
-the result of its gradually diminished vitality
-and sad weariness. The wrangling that
-occurs at times between art and criticism is,
-at bottom, merely a fraternal discord, one in
-which Cain and Abel belabour each other with
-stuffed clubs. Criticism is often most sympathetic
-when it is apparently most cruel: the
-propounder of the sternest, hardest philosophy
-that the civilized world has known never failed
-sentimentally to kiss and embrace his sister,
-Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche, every
-night at bed-time. &#8220;It is not possible,&#8221; Cabell
-has written, &#8220;to draw inspiration from a woman&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span>
-beauty unless you comprehend how easy
-it would be to murder her.&#8221; And&mdash;&#8220;Only
-those who have firmness may be really tender-hearted,&#8221;
-said Rochefoucauld. One may
-sometimes even throw mud to tonic purpose.
-Consider Karlsbad.</p>
-
-<p>Art is the haven wherein the disillusioned
-may find illusion. Truth is no part of art.
-Nor is the mission of art simple beauty, as the
-text books tell us. The mission of art is the
-magnification of simple beauty to proportions
-so heroic as to be almost overpowering. Art
-is a gross exaggeration of natural beauty:
-there was never a woman so beautiful as the
-Venus di Milo, or a man so beautiful as the
-Apollo Belvedere of the Vatican, or a sky so
-beautiful as Monet&#8217;s, or human speech so beautiful
-as Shakespeare&#8217;s, or the song of a nightingale
-so beautiful as Ludwig van Beethoven&#8217;s.
-But as art is a process of magnification, so
-criticism is a process of reduction. Its purpose
-is the reducing of the magnifications of
-art to the basic classic and &#230;sthetic principles,
-and the subsequent announcement thereof in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span>
-terms proportioned to the artist&#8217;s interplay of
-fundamental skill and overtopping imagination.</p>
-
-<p>The most general fault of criticism lies in a
-confusion of its own internal processes with
-those of art: it is in the habit of regarding the
-business of art as a reduction of life to its
-essence of beauty, and the business of criticism
-as an expansion of that essence to its
-fullest flow. The opposite is more reasonable.
-Art is a beautiful, swollen lie; criticism, a cold
-compress. The concern of art is with beauty;
-the concern of criticism is with truth. And
-truth and beauty, despite the Sunday School,
-are often strangers. This confusion of the
-business of art and that of criticism has given
-birth to the so-called &#8220;contagious,&#8221; or inspirational,
-criticism, than which nothing is more
-mongrel and absurd. Criticism is designed to
-state facts&mdash;charmingly, gracefully, if possible&mdash;but
-still facts. It is not designed to exhort,
-enlist, convert. This is the business not of
-the critic, but of those readers of the critic
-whom the facts succeed in convincing and galvanizing.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span>
-Contagious criticism is merely a
-vainglorious critic&#8217;s essay at popularity: facts
-heated up to a degree where they melt into
-caressing nothingness.</p>
-
-<p>But if this &#8220;criticism with a glow&#8221; is not to
-be given countenance, even less is to be suffered
-the criticism that, in its effort at a fastidious
-and elegant reserve, leans so far backward
-that it freezes its ears. This species of criticism
-fails not only to enkindle the reader, but
-fails also&mdash;and this is more important&mdash;to enkindle
-the critic himself. The ideal critic is
-perhaps much like a Thermos bottle: full of
-warmth, he suggests the presence of the heat
-within him without radiating it. This inner
-warmth is essential to a critic. But this inner
-warmth, where it exists, is automatically
-chilled and banished from a critic by a
-protracted indulgence in excessive critical
-reserve. Just as the professional frown
-assumed by a much photographed public magnifico
-often becomes stubbornly fixed upon his
-hitherto gentle brow, so does the prolonged
-spurious constraint of a critic in due time<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span>
-psychologically hoist him on his own petard.
-A writer&#8217;s work does not grow more and more
-like him; a writer grows more and more like
-his work. The best writing that a man produces
-is always just a little superior to himself.
-There never was a literary artist who did not
-appreciate the difficulty of keeping up to the
-pace of his writings. A writer is dominated
-by the standard of his own writings; he is a
-slave <i>in transitu</i>, lashed, tormented, and miserable.
-The weak and inferior literary artist,
-such a critic as the one alluded to, soon
-becomes the helpless victim of his own writings:
-like a vampire of his own creation they
-turn upon him and suck from him the warm
-blood that was erstwhile his. A pose in time
-becomes natural: a man with a good left eye
-cannot affect a monocle for years without
-eventually coming to need it. A critic cannot
-write ice without becoming in time himself
-at least partly frosted.</p>
-
-<p>Paraphrasing Pascal, to little minds all
-things are great. Great art is in constant
-conflict with the awe of little minds. Art is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span>
-something like a wonderful trapeze performer
-swinging high above the heads of the bewildered
-multitude and nervous lest it be made
-to lose its balance and to slip by the periodic
-sudden loud marvellings of the folks below.
-The little mind and its little criticism are the
-flattering foes of sound art. Such art
-demands for its training and triumph the
-countless preliminary body blows of muscular
-criticism guided by a muscular mind. Art
-and the artist cannot be developed by mere
-back-slapping. If art, according to Beul&#233;, is
-the intervention of the human mind in the
-elements furnished by experience, criticism is
-the intervention of the human mind in the
-elements furnished by &#230;sthetic passion. Art
-and the artist are ever youthful lovers; criticism
-is their chaperon.</p>
-
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>I do not believe finally in this or that
-&#8220;theory&#8221; of criticism. There are as many
-sound and apt species of criticism as there<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span>
-are works to be criticized. To say that art
-must be criticized only after this formula or
-after that, is to say that art must be contrived
-only out of this formula or out of that. As
-every work of art is an entity, a thing in itself,
-so is every piece of criticism an entity, a thing
-in itself. That &#8220;Thus Spake Zarathustra&#8221;
-must inevitably be criticized by the canons of
-the identical &#8220;theory&#8221; with which one criticizes
-&#8220;Tristan and Isolde&#8221; is surely difficult of
-reasoning.</p>
-
-<p>To the Goethe-Carlyle doctrine that the
-critic&#8217;s duty lies alone in discerning the artist&#8217;s
-aim, his point of view and, finally, his execution
-of the task before him, it is easy enough
-to subscribe, but certainly this is not a &#8220;theory&#8221;
-of criticism so much as it is a foundation for
-a theory. To advance it as a theory, full-grown,
-full-fledged and flapping, as it has been
-advanced by the Italian Croce and his admirers,
-is to publish the preface to a book without
-the book itself. Accepted as a theory complete
-in itself, it fails by virtue of its several undeveloped
-intrinsic problems, chief among<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span>
-which is its neglect to consider the undeniable
-fact that, though each work of art is indubitably
-an entity and so to be considered, there
-is yet in creative art what may be termed an
-&#230;sthetic genealogy that bears heavily upon
-comprehensive criticism and that renders the
-artist&#8217;s aim, his point of view and his execution
-of the task before him susceptible to a
-criticism predicated in a measure upon the
-work of the sound artist who has just preceded
-him.</p>
-
-<p>The Goethe-Carlyle hypothesis is a little too
-liberal. It calls for qualifications. It gives
-the artist too much ground, and the critic too
-little. To discern the artist&#8217;s aim, to discern
-the artist&#8217;s point of view, are phrases that
-require an amount of plumbing, and not a
-few foot-notes. It is entirely possible, for
-example, that the immediate point of view of
-an artist be faulty, yet the execution of his
-immediate task exceedingly fine. If carefully
-planned triumph in art is an entity, so also
-may be undesigned triumph. I do not say
-that any such latter phenomenon is usual, but<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span>
-it is conceivable, and hence may be employed
-as a test of the critical hypothesis in point.
-Unschooled, without aim or point of view in
-the sense of this hypothesis, Schumann&#8217;s compositions
-at the age of eleven for chorus and
-orchestra offer the quasi-theory some resistance.
-The question of the comparative merit
-of these compositions and the artist&#8217;s subsequent
-work may not strictly be brought into
-the argument, since the point at issue is merely
-a theory and since theory is properly to be
-tested by theory.</p>
-
-<p>Intent and achievement are not necessarily
-twins. I have always perversely thought it
-likely that there is often a greater degree of
-accident in fine art than one is permitted to
-believe. The aim and point of view of a
-bad artist are often admirable; the execution
-of a fine artist may sometimes be founded upon
-a point of view that is, from an apparently
-sound critical estimate, at striking odds with
-it. One of the finest performances in all modern
-dramatic writing, upon its critical reception
-as such, came as a great surprise to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>
-writer who almost unwittingly had achieved
-it. Art is often unconscious of itself. Shakespeare,
-writing popular plays to order, wrote
-the greatest plays that dramatic art has
-known. Mark Twain, in a disgusted moment,
-threw off a practical joke, and it turned out to
-be literature.</p>
-
-<p>A strict adherence to the principles enunciated
-in the Goethe-Carlyle theory would
-result in a confinement of art for all the theory&#8217;s
-bold aim in exactly the opposite direction.
-For all the critic may accurately say,
-the aim and point of view of, say, Richard
-Strauss in &#8220;Don Quixote&#8221; and &#8220;A Hero&#8217;s
-Life,&#8221; may be imperfect, yet the one critical
-fact persists that the executions are remarkably
-fine. All things considered, it were perhaps
-better that the critical theory under
-discussion, if it be accepted at all, be turned
-end foremost: that the artist&#8217;s execution of
-the task before him be considered either apart
-from his aim and point of view, or that it be
-considered first, and then&mdash;with not too much
-insistence upon them&mdash;his point of view and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>
-his aim. This would seem to be a more logical
-&#230;sthetic and critical order. Tolstoi, with a
-sound, intelligent and technically perfect aim
-and point of view composed second-rate
-drama. So, too, Maeterlinck. Synge, by his
-own admissions adjudged critically and dramatically
-guilty on both counts, composed one
-of the truly first-rate dramas of the Anglo-Saxon
-stage.</p>
-
-<p>In its very effort to avoid pigeon-holing,
-the Goethe-Carlyle theory pigeon-holes itself.
-In its commendable essay at catholicity, it is
-like a garter so elastic that it fails to hold itself
-up. That there may not be contradictions in
-the contentions here set forth, I am not sure.
-But I advance no fixed, definite theory of my
-own; I advance merely contradictions of certain
-of the phases of the theories held by
-others, and contradictions are ever in the habit
-of begetting contradictions. Yet such contradictions
-are in themselves apposite and
-soundly critical, since any theory susceptible
-of contradictions must itself be contradictory
-and insecure. If I suggest any theory on my<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span>
-part it is a variable one: a theory that, in this
-instance, is one thing and in that, another.
-Criticism, as I see it&mdash;and I share the common
-opinion&mdash;is simply a sensitive, experienced and
-thoroughbred artist&#8217;s effort to interpret, in
-terms of &#230;sthetic doctrine and his own peculiar
-soul, the work of another artist reciprocally
-to that artist and thus, as with a reflecting
-mirror, to his public. But to state merely
-what criticism is, is not to state the doctrine
-of its application. And herein, as I see it, is
-where the theorists fail to cover full ground.
-The anatomy of criticism is composed not of
-one theory, but of a theory&mdash;more or less generally
-agreed upon&mdash;upon which are reared in
-turn other theories that are not so generally
-agreed upon. The Goethe-Carlyle theory is
-thus like a three-story building on which the
-constructor has left off work after finishing
-only the first story. What certain aspects of
-these other stories may be like, I have already
-tried to suggest.</p>
-
-<p>I have said that, if I have any theory of my
-own, it is a theory susceptible in practice of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span>
-numerous surface changes. These surface
-changes often disturb in a measure this or that
-phase of what lies at the bottom. Thus,
-speaking as a critic of the theatre, I find it
-impossible to reconcile myself to criticizing
-acting and drama from the vantage point of
-the same theory, say, for example, the Goethe-Carlyle
-theory. This theory fits criticism of
-drama much better than it fits criticism of acting,
-just as it fits criticism of painting and
-sculpture much more snugly than criticism of
-music. The means whereby the emotions are
-directly affected, and soundly affected, may
-at times be critically meretricious, yet the
-accomplishment itself may be, paradoxically,
-artistic. Perhaps the finest acting performance
-of our generation is Bernhardt&#8217;s Camille:
-its final effect is tremendous: yet the means
-whereby it is contrived are obviously inartistic.
-Again, &#8220;King Lear,&#8221; searched into with critical
-chill, is artistically a poor instance of play-making,
-yet its effect is precisely the effect
-striven for. Surely, in cases like these, criticism
-founded strictly upon an inflexible theory<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>
-is futile criticism, and not only futile but
-eminently unfair.</p>
-
-<p>Here, of course, I exhibit still more contradictions,
-but through contradictions we may
-conceivably gain more secure ground. When
-his book is once opened, the author&#8217;s mouth is
-shut. (Wilde, I believe, said that; and though
-for some peculiar reason it is today regarded
-as suicidal to quote the often profound Wilde
-in any serious argument, I risk the danger.)
-But when a dramatist&#8217;s play or a composer&#8217;s
-symphony is opened, the author has only
-begun to open his mouth. What results, an
-emotional art within an intellectual art, calls
-for a critical theory within a critical theory.
-To this composite end, I offer a suggestion:
-blend with the Goethe-Carlyle theory that of
-the aforementioned Wilde, to wit, that beauty
-is uncriticizable, since it has as many meanings
-as man has moods, since it is the symbol of
-symbols, and since it reveals everything
-because it expresses nothing. The trouble
-with criticism&mdash;again to pose a contradiction&mdash;is
-that, in certain instances, it is often too cerebral.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>
-Feeling a great thrill of beauty, it
-turns to its somewhat puzzled mind and is
-apprised that the thrill which it has unquestionably
-enjoyed from the work of art might
-conceivably be of pathological origin, a fremitus
-or vibration felt upon percussion of a
-hydatoid tumour.</p>
-
-<p>The Goethe-Carlyle theory, properly rigid
-and unyielding so far as emotional groundlings
-are concerned, may, I believe, at times safely
-be chucked under the chin and offered a communication
-of gipsy ardour by the critic whose
-emotions are the residuum of trial, test and
-experience.</p>
-
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>Coquelin put it that the footlights exaggerate
-everything: they modify the laws of
-space and of time; they put miles in a few
-square feet; they make minutes appear to be
-hours. Of this exaggeration, dramatic criticism&mdash;which
-is the branch of criticism of which
-I treat in particular&mdash;has caught something.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span>
-Of all the branches of criticism it is intrinsically
-the least sober and the least accurately
-balanced. It always reminds me somehow of
-the lash in the hands of &#338;acus, in &#8220;The
-Frogs,&#8221; falling upon Bacchus and Xanthus
-to discover which of the two is the divine, the
-latter meantime endeavouring to conceal the
-pain that would betray their mortality by various
-transparent dodges. Drama is a two-souled
-art: half divine, half clownish. Shakespeare
-is the greatest dramatist who ever lived
-because he alone, of all dramatists, most accurately
-sensed the mongrel nature of his art.
-Criticism of drama, it follows, is similarly a
-two-souled art: half sober, half mad. Drama
-is a deliberate intoxicant; dramatic criticism,
-aromatic spirits of ammonia; the re-creation is
-never perfect; there is always a trace of tipsiness
-left. Even the best dramatic criticism is
-always just a little dramatic. It indulges, a
-trifle, in acting. It can never be as impersonal,
-however much certain of its practitioners may
-try, as criticism of painting or of sculpture or
-of literature. This is why the best criticism of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>
-the theatre must inevitably be personal criticism.
-The theatre itself is distinctly personal;
-its address is directly personal. It holds the
-mirror not up to nature, but to the spectator&#8217;s
-individual idea of nature. If it doesn&#8217;t, it
-fails. The spectator, if he is a critic, merely
-holds up his own mirror to the drama&#8217;s mirror:
-a reflection of the first reflection is the result.
-Dramatic criticism is this second reflection.
-And so the best dramatic criticism has about
-it a flavour of the unconscious, grotesque and
-unpremeditated. &#8220;When Lewes was at his
-business,&#8221; Shaw has said, &#8220;he seldom remembered
-that he was a gentleman or a scholar.&#8221;
-(Shaw was speaking of Lewes&#8217; free use of
-vulgarity and impudence whenever they happened
-to be the proper tools for his job.) &#8220;In
-this he showed himself a true craftsman, intent
-on making the measurements and analyses
-of his criticism as accurate, and their expression
-as clear and vivid, as possible, instead
-of allowing himself to be distracted by the
-vanity of playing the elegant man of letters,
-or writing with perfect good taste, or hinting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span>
-in every line that he was above his work. In
-exacting all this from himself, and taking his
-revenge by expressing his most laboured conclusions
-with a levity that gave them the air
-of being the unpremeditated whimsicalities of
-a man who had perversely taken to writing
-about the theatre for the sake of the jest
-latent in his own outrageous unfitness for it,
-Lewes rolled his stone up the hill quite in the
-modern manner of Mr. Walkley, dissembling
-its huge weight, and apparently kicking it at
-random hither and thither in pure wantonness.&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>Mr. Spingarn, in his exceptionally interesting,
-if somewhat overly indignant, treatise on
-&#8220;Creative Criticism,&#8221; provides, it seems to me,
-a particularly clear illustration of the manner
-in which the proponents of the more modern
-theories of criticism imprison themselves in
-the extravagance of their freedom. While
-liberating art from all the old rules of criticism,
-they simultaneously confine criticism
-with the new rules&mdash;or ghosts of rules&mdash;wherewith
-they free art. If each work of art is a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>
-unit, a thing in itself, as is commonly agreed,
-why should not each work of criticism be
-similarly a unit, a thing in itself? If art is,
-in each and every case, a matter of individual
-expression, why should not criticism, in each
-and every such case, be similarly and relevantly
-a matter of individual expression? In
-freeing art of definitions, has not criticism
-been too severely defined? I believe that it
-has been. I believe that there may be as many
-kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art.
-I believe that there may be sound analytical,
-sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic,
-sound destructive, sound constructive,
-and other sound species of criticism.
-If art knows no rules, criticism knows no
-rules&mdash;or, at least, none save those that are
-obvious. If Brahms&#8217; scherzo in E flat minor,
-op. 4, is an entity, a work in and of itself,
-why shouldn&#8217;t Huneker&#8217;s criticism of it be
-regarded as an entity, a work in and of itself?
-If there is in Huneker&#8217;s work inspiration from
-without, so, too, is there in Brahms&#8217;: if Brahms
-may be held a unit in this particular instance<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>
-with no consideration of Chopin, why may not
-Huneker with no consideration of Brahms?</p>
-
-<p>If this is pushing things pretty far, it is
-the Spingarns who have made the pushing necessary.
-&#8220;Taste,&#8221; says Mr. Spingarn, &#8220;must
-reproduce the work of art within itself in
-order to understand and judge it; and at that
-moment &#230;sthetic judgment becomes nothing
-more or less than creative art itself.&#8221; This
-rings true. But granting the perfection of
-the taste, why define and limit the critical
-creative art thus born of reproduction? No
-sooner has a law been enunciated, writes Mr.
-Spingarn, than it has been broken by an artist
-impatient or ignorant of its restraints, and the
-critics have been obliged to explain away these
-violations of their laws or gradually to change
-the laws themselves. If art, he continues, is
-organic expression, and every work of art is
-to be interrogated with the question, &#8220;What
-has it expressed, and how completely?&#8221;, there
-is no place for the question whether it has
-conformed to some convenient classification of
-critics or to some law derived from this classification.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>
-Once again, truly put. But so,
-too, no sooner have laws been enunciated than
-they have been broken by critics impatient or
-ignorant of their restraints, and the critics of
-critics have been obliged to explain away these
-violations of the laws, or gradually to change
-the laws themselves. And so, too, have these
-works of criticism provided no place for the
-question whether they have conformed to some
-convenient classification of the critics of criticism
-or to some law derived from this classification.</p>
-
-<p>&#8220;Criticism,&#8221; said Carlyle, his theories apart,
-&#8220;stands like an interpreter between the inspired
-and the uninspired, between the prophet
-and those who hear the melody of his words,
-and catch some glimpse of their material meaning,
-but understand not their deeper import.&#8221;
-This is the best definition that I know of.
-It defines without defining; it gives into the
-keeping of the interpreter the hundred languages
-of art and merely urges him, with
-whatever means may best and properly suit
-his ends, to translate them clearly to those<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>
-that do not understand; it sets him free from
-the very shackles which Carlyle himself, removing
-from art, wound in turn about him.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span>
-<p class="ph2">II. DRAMA AS AN ART</p>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span></p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span>
-<h2 class="nobreak">II. DRAMA AS AN ART</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p class="drop-cap">IF the best of criticism, in the familiar
-description of Anatole France, lies in
-the adventure of a soul among masterpieces,
-the best of drama may perhaps be
-described as the adventure of a masterpiece
-among souls. Drama is fine or impoverished
-in the degree that it evokes from such souls a
-fitting and noble reaction.</p>
-
-<p>Drama is, in essence, a democratic art in
-constant brave conflict with aristocracy of intelligence,
-soul and emotion. When drama
-triumphs, a masterpiece like &#8220;Hamlet&#8221; comes
-to life. When the conflict ends in a draw, a
-drama half-way between greatness and littleness
-is the result&mdash;a drama, say, such as &#8220;El
-Gran Galeoto.&#8221; When the struggle ends in
-defeat, the result is a &#8220;Way Down East&#8221; or a
-&#8220;Lightnin&#8217;.&#8221; This, obviously, is not to say<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>
-that great drama may not be popular drama,
-nor popular drama great drama, for I speak of
-drama here not as this play or that, but as a
-specific art. And it is as a specific art that it
-finds its test and trial, not in its own intrinsically
-democratic soul, but in the extrinsic aristocratic
-soul that is taste, and connoisseurship,
-and final judgment. Drama that has come to
-be at once great and popular has ever first been
-given the imprimatur, not of democratic souls,
-but of aristocratic. Shakespeare and Moli&#232;re
-triumphed over aristocracy of intelligence, soul
-and emotion before that triumph was presently
-carried on into the domain of inferior intelligence,
-soul and emotion. In our own day, the
-drama of Hauptmann, Shaw and the American
-O&#8217;Neill has come into its popular own only
-after it first achieved the imprimatur of what
-we may term the unpopular, or undemocratic,
-theatres. Aristocracy cleared the democratic
-path for Ibsen, as it cleared it, in so far as
-possible, for Rostand and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.</p>
-
-<p>Great drama is the rainbow born when the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>
-sun of reflection and understanding smiles
-anew upon an intelligence and emotion which
-that drama has respectively shot with gleams
-of brilliant lightning and drenched with the
-rain of brilliant tears. Great drama, like
-great men and great women, is always just a
-little sad. Only idiots may be completely
-happy. Reflection, sympathy, wisdom, gallant
-gentleness, experience&mdash;the chords upon
-which great drama is played&mdash;these are wistful
-chords. The commonplace urge that drama,
-to be truly great, must uplift is, in the sense
-that the word uplift is used, childish. The
-mission of great drama is not to make numskulls
-glad that they are alive, but to make
-them speculate why they are permitted to be
-alive at all. And since this is the mission of
-great drama&mdash;if its mission may, indeed, be reduced
-to any phrase&mdash;it combines within itself,
-together with this mystical and awe-struck appeal
-to the proletariat, a direct and agreeable
-appeal to such persons as are, by reason of
-their metaphysical perception and emotional
-culture, superior to and contemptuous of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>
-proletariat. Fine drama, in truth, is usually
-just a trifle snobbish. It has no traffic with
-such souls as are readily to be made to feel
-&#8220;uplifted&#8221; by spurious philosophical nostrums
-and emotional sugar pills. Its business is with
-what the matchless Dryden hailed &#8220;souls of
-the highest rank and truest understanding&#8221;:
-souls who find a greater uplift in the noble depressions
-of Brahms&#8217; first trio, Bartolommeo&#8217;s
-Madonna della Misericordia, and Joseph Conrad&#8217;s
-&#8220;Youth&#8221; than in the easy buoyancies of
-John Philip Sousa, Howard Chandler Christy
-and Rupert Hughes. The aim of great drama
-is not to make men happy with themselves as
-they are, but with themselves as they might,
-yet alas cannot, be. As Gautier has it, &#8220;The
-aim of art is not exact reproduction of nature,
-but creation, by means of forms and colours, of
-a microcosm wherein may be produced dreams,
-sensations, and ideas inspired by the aspect of
-the world.&#8221; If drama is irrevocably a democratic
-art and uplift of the great masses of men
-its noblest end, Mrs. Porter&#8217;s &#8220;Pollyanna&#8221;
-must endure as a work of dramatic art a thousand<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>
-times finer than Corneille&#8217;s &#8220;Polyeucte.&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>Drama has been strictly defined by the ritualists
-in a dozen different ways. &#8220;Drama,&#8221;
-says one, &#8220;must be based on character, and the
-action proceed from character.&#8221; &#8220;Drama,&#8221;
-stipulates another, &#8220;is not an imitation of men,
-but of an action and of life: character is subsidiary
-to action.&#8221; &#8220;Drama,&#8221; promulgates still
-another, &#8220;is the struggle of a will against obstacles.&#8221;
-And so on, so on. Rules, rules and
-more rules. Pigeon-holes upon pigeon-holes.
-Good drama is anything that interests an intelligently
-emotional group of persons assembled
-together in an illuminated hall. Moli&#232;re,
-wise among dramatists, said as much,
-though in somewhat more, and doubtless too,
-sweeping words. Throughout the ages of
-drama there will be always Romanticists of
-one sort or another, brave and splendid spirits,
-who will have to free themselves from the definitions
-and limitations imposed upon them by
-the neo-Bossus and Boileaus, and the small
-portion Voltaires, La Harpes and Marmontels.
-Drama is struggle, a conflict of wills?<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span>
-Then what of &#8220;Ghosts&#8221;? Drama is action?
-Then what of &#8220;Nachtasyl&#8221;? Drama is character?
-Then what of &#8220;The Dream Play&#8221;? &#8220;A
-&#8216;character&#8217; upon the stage,&#8221; wrote the author
-of the last named drama, &#8220;has become a creature
-ready-made&mdash;a mere mechanism that
-drives the man&mdash;I do not believe in these theatrical
-&#8216;characters.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>Of all the higher arts, drama is perhaps the
-simplest and easiest. Its anatomy is composed
-of all the other arts, high and low, stripped
-to their elementals. It is a synthesis of
-those portions of these other arts that, being
-elemental, are most easily assimilable on the
-part of the multitude. It is a snatch of music,
-a bit of painting, a moment of dancing, a slice
-of sculpture, draped upon the skeleton of
-literature. At its highest, it ranks with literature,
-but never above it. One small notch
-below, and it ranks only with itself, in its
-own isolated and generically peculiar field.
-Drama, indeed, is dancing literature: a hybrid
-art. It is often purple and splendid; it is
-often profoundly beautiful and profoundly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span>
-moving. Yet, with a direct appeal to the emotions
-as its first and encompassing aim, it has
-never, even at its finest, been able to exercise
-the measure of direct emotional appeal that is
-exercised, say, by Chopin&#8217;s C sharp minor
-Nocturne, op. 27, No. 1, or by the soft romance
-of the canvases of Palma Vecchio, or by
-Rodin&#8217;s superb &#8220;Eternal Spring,&#8221; or by Zola&#8217;s
-&#8220;La Terre.&#8221; It may, at its finest as at its
-worst, of course subjugate and triumph over
-inexperienced emotionalism, but the greatest
-drama of Shakespeare himself has never, in the
-truthful confession of cultivated emotionalism,
-influenced that emotionalism as has the
-greatest literature, or the greatest music, or
-the greatest painting or sculpture. The
-splendid music of &#8220;Romeo&#8221; or &#8220;Hamlet&#8221; is
-not so eloquent and moving as that of
-&#8220;Tristan&#8221; or &#8220;Lohengrin&#8221;; no situation in
-the whole of Hauptmann can strike in the
-heart so thrilling and profound a chord of pity
-as a single line in Allegri&#8217;s obvious &#8220;Miserere.&#8221;
-The greatest note of comedy in drama falls
-short of the note of comedy in the &#8220;Coffee-Cantata&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>
-of Bach; the greatest note of ironic
-remorse falls short of that in the scherzo in B
-minor of Chopin; the greatest intellectual note
-falls short of that in the first and last movements
-of the C minor symphony of Brahms.
-What play of Sudermann&#8217;s has the direct appeal
-of &#8220;The Indian Lily&#8221;? What play made
-out of Hardy&#8217;s &#8220;Tess,&#8221; however adroitly contrived,
-retains the powerful appeal of the original
-piece of literature? To descend, what
-obvious thrill melodrama, designed frankly for
-dollars, has&mdash;with all its painstaking and deliberate
-intent&mdash;yet succeeded in provoking
-half the thrill and shock of the obvious second
-chapter of Andreas Latzko&#8217;s equally obvious
-&#8220;Men in War&#8221;?</p>
-
-<p>Art is an evocation of beautiful emotions:
-art is art in the degree that it succeeds in this
-evocation: drama succeeds in an inferior degree.
-Whatever emotion drama may succeed
-brilliantly in evoking, another art succeeds in
-evoking more brilliantly.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span></p>
-
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>Although, of course, one speaks of drama
-here primarily in the sense of acted drama, it
-is perhaps not necessary so strictly to confine
-one&#8217;s self. For when the critic confines himself
-in his discussion of drama to the acted
-drama, he regularly brings upon himself from
-other critics&mdash;chiefly bookish fellows whose
-theatrical knowledge is meagre&mdash;the very
-largely unwarranted embarrassment of arguments
-anent &#8220;crowd psychology&#8221; and the like
-which, while they have little or nothing to do
-with the case, none the less make a certain
-deep impression upon his readers. (Readers
-of criticism become automatically critics; with
-his first sentence, the critic challenges his critic-reader&#8217;s
-sense of argument.) This constantly
-advanced contention of &#8220;crowd psychology,&#8221;
-of which drama is supposed to be at once master
-and slave, has small place in a consideration
-of drama, from whatever sound point of
-view one elects to consider the latter. If
-&#8220;crowd psychology&#8221; operates in the case of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>
-theatre drama, it operates also in the case of
-concert-hall music. Yet no one so far as I
-know seriously maintains that, in a criticism of
-music, this &#8220;crowd psychology&#8221; has any place.</p>
-
-<p>I have once before pointed out that, even
-accepting the theory of crowd psychology and
-its direct and indirect implications so far as
-drama is concerned, it is as nonsensical to assume
-that one thousand persons assembled together
-before a drama in a theatre are, by reason
-of their constituting a crowd, any more
-likely to be moved automatically than the same
-crowd of one thousand persons assembled together
-before a painting in an art gallery.
-Furthermore, the theory that collective intelligence
-and emotionalism are a more facile and
-ingenuous intelligence and emotionalism, while
-it may hold full water in the psychological
-laboratory, holds little in actual external demonstration,
-particularly in any consideration
-of a crowd before one of the arts. While it
-may be true that the Le Bon and Tarde theory
-applies aptly to the collective psychology
-of a crowd at a prize-fight or a bull-fight or<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>
-a circus, one may be permitted severe doubts
-that it holds equally true of a crowd in a
-theatre or in an art gallery or in a concert hall.
-The tendency of such a latter group is not
-&#230;sthetically downward, but upward. And
-not only &#230;sthetically, but intellectually and
-emotionally. (I speak, of course, and with
-proper relevance, of a crowd assembled to hear
-good drama or good music, or to see good
-painting. The customary obscuring tactic of
-critics in this situation is to argue out the principles
-of intelligent reaction to good drama in
-terms of yokel reaction to bad drama. Analysis
-of the principles of sound theatre drama
-and the reaction of a group of eight hundred
-citizens of Marion, Ohio, to &#8220;The Two Orphans&#8221;
-somehow do not seem to me to be
-especially apposite.) The fine drama or the
-fine piece of music does not make its auditor
-part of a crowd; it removes him, and every
-one else in the crowd, from the crowd, and
-makes him an individual. The crowd ceases
-to exist as a crowd; it becomes a crowd of
-units, of separate individuals. The dramas of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>
-Mr. Owen Davis make crowds; the dramas
-of Shakespeare make individuals.</p>
-
-<p>The argument to the contrary always somewhat
-grotesquely assumes that the crowd assembled
-at a fine play, and promptly susceptible
-to group psychology, is a new crowd,
-one that has never attended a fine play before.
-Such an assumption falls to pieces in two ways.
-Firstly, it is beyond reason to believe that it
-is true in more than one instance out of a
-hundred; and secondly it would not be true
-even if it were true. For, granting that a
-crowd of one thousand persons were seeing
-great drama for the first time in their lives,
-what reason is there for believing that the
-majority of persons in the crowd who had
-never seen great drama and didn&#8217;t know
-exactly what to make of it would be swayed
-and influenced by the minority who had never
-seen great drama but did know what to make
-of it? If this were true, no great drama could
-ever possibly fail in the commercial theatre.
-Or, to test the hypothesis further, take it the
-other way round. What reason is there for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>
-believing that the majority in this crowd would
-be moved the one way or the other, either by
-a minority that did understand the play, or did
-not understand it? Or take it in another way
-still. What reason is there for believing that
-the minority in this crowd who did know what
-the drama was about would be persuaded
-emotionally by the majority who did not know
-what the drama was about?</p>
-
-<p>Theories, and again theories. But the facts
-fail to support them. Take the lowest type of
-crowd imaginable, one in which there is not
-one cultured man in a thousand&mdash;the crowd,
-say, at a professional American baseball game&mdash;and
-pack it into an American equivalent for
-Reinhardt&#8217;s Grosses Schauspielhaus. The
-play, let us say, is &#8220;&#338;dipus Rex.&#8221; At the
-ball game, the crowd psychology of Le Bon
-operated to the full. But what now? Would
-the crowd, in the theatre and before a great
-drama, be the same crowd? Would it not be
-an entirely different crowd? Would not its
-group psychology promptly and violently suffer
-a sudden change? Whether out of curiosity,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>
-disgust, admiration, social shame or what
-not, would it not rapidly segregate itself,
-spiritually or physically, into various groups?
-What is the Le Bon theatrical view of the
-crowd psychology that somehow didn&#8217;t come
-off during the initial engagement of Barrie&#8217;s
-&#8220;Peter Pan&#8221; in Washington, D. C.? Or of
-the crowd psychology that worked the other
-way round when Ibsen was first played in London?
-Or of the crowd psychology that, operating
-regularly, if artificially, at the New
-York premi&#232;res, most often fails, for all its
-high enthusiasm, to move either the minority
-or the majority in its composition?</p>
-
-<p>The question of sound drama and the pack
-psychology of a congress of groundlings is a
-famous one: it gets nowhere. Sound drama
-and sound audiences are alone to be considered
-at one and the same time. And, as I have
-noted, the tendency of willing, or even semi-willing,
-auditors and spectators is in an upward
-direction, not a downward. No intelligent
-spectator at a performance of &#8220;Ben Hur&#8221;
-has ever been made to feel like throwing his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span>
-hat into the air and cheering by the similar
-actions of the mob spectators to the left and
-right of him. No ignoble auditor of &#8220;The
-Laughter of the Gods&#8221; but has been made to
-feel, in some part, the contagion of cultivated
-appreciation to <i>his</i> left and right. &#8220;I forget,&#8221;
-wrote Sarcey, in a consideration of the subject
-of which we have been treating, &#8220;what
-tyrant it was of ancient Greece to whom massacres
-were every-day affairs, but who wept
-copiously over the misfortunes of a heroine in
-a tragedy. He was the audience; and for the
-one evening clothed himself in the sentiments
-of the public.&#8221; A typical example of sophisticated
-reasoning. How does Sarcey know
-that it was not the rest of the audience&mdash;the
-crowd&mdash;that was influenced by this repentant
-and copiously lachrymose individual, rather
-than that it was this individual who was moved
-by the crowd?</p>
-
-<p>If fallacies perchance insinuate themselves
-into these opposing contentions, it is a case of
-fallacy versus fallacy: my intent is not so much
-to prove anything as to indicate the presence<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>
-of holes in the proofs of the other side. These
-holes seem to me to be numerous, and of considerable
-circumference. A description of two
-of them may suffice to suggest the rest. Take,
-as the first of these, the familiar Castelvetro
-doctrine that, since a theatrical audience is not
-a select congress but a motley crowd, the dramatist,
-ever conscious of the group psychology,
-must inevitably avoid all themes and ideas unintelligible
-to such a gathering. It may be
-true that a theatrical audience is not a select
-congress, but why confine the argument to
-theatrical audiences and seek thus to prove
-something of drama that may be proved as
-well&mdash;if one is given to such idiosyncrasies&mdash;of
-music? What, as I have said before, of
-opera and concert hall audiences? Consider
-the average audience at Covent Garden, the
-Metropolitan, Carnegie Hall. Is it any way
-culturally superior to the average audience at
-the St. James&#8217;s Theatre, or the Th&#233;&#226;tre de
-l&#8217;Oeuvre, or the Plymouth&mdash;or even the Neighbourhood
-Playhouse down in Grand Street?
-What of the audiences who attended the original<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>
-performances of Beethoven&#8217;s &#8220;Leonore&#8221;
-(&#8220;Fidelio&#8221;), Berlioz&#8217;s &#8220;Benvenuto Cellini,&#8221;
-the original performances of Wagner in
-France and the performances of his &#8220;Der Fliegende
-Holl&#228;nder&#8221; in Germany, the operas of
-H&#228;ndel in England in the years 1733-37, the
-work of Rossini in Italy, the concerts of
-Chopin during his tour of England and Scotland?...
-Again, as to the imperative necessity
-of the dramatist&#8217;s avoidance of all
-themes and ideas unintelligible to a mob audience,
-what of the success among such very
-audiences of&mdash;to name but a few more recent
-profitably produced and locally readily recognizable
-examples&mdash;Shaw&#8217;s &#8220;Getting Married,&#8221;
-Augustus Thomas&#8217; &#8220;The Witching
-Hour,&#8221; Ibsen&#8217;s &#8220;The Wild Duck,&#8221; Dunsany&#8217;s
-&#8220;The Laughter of the Gods,&#8221; Barrie&#8217;s &#8220;Mary
-Rose,&#8221; Strindberg&#8217;s &#8220;The Father,&#8221; Synge&#8217;s
-&#8220;Playboy&#8221;?... Surely it will be quickly
-allowed that however obvious the themes and
-ideas of these plays may be to the few, they
-are hardly within the ready intelligence of
-what the theorists picture as the imaginary<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>
-mob theatre audience. Fine drama is independent
-of all such theories: the dramatist
-who subscribes to them should not figure in any
-treatise upon drama as an art.</p>
-
-<p>A second illustration: the equivocation to
-the effect that drama, being a democratic art,
-may not properly be evaluated in terms of
-more limited, and aristocratic, taste. It seems
-to me, at least, an idiotic assumption that
-drama is a more democratic art than music.
-All great art is democratic in intention, if
-not in reward. Michelangelo, Shakespeare,
-Wagner and Zola are democratic artists, and
-their art democratic art. It is criticism of
-Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Wagner and Zola
-that is aristocratic. Criticism, not art, generically
-wears the ermine and the purple. To
-appraise a democratic art in terms of democracy
-is to attempt to effect a chemical reaction
-in nitrogen with nitrogen. If drama is,
-critically, a democratic art since it is meant
-not to be read by the few but to be played before
-the many, music must be critically no less
-a democratic art. Yet the theorists conveniently<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span>
-overlook this embarrassment. Nevertheless,
-if Shakespeare&#8217;s dramas were designed
-for the heterogeneous ear, so, too, were the
-songs of Schumann. No great artist has ever
-in his heart deliberately fashioned his work for
-a remote and forgotten cellar, dark and stairless.
-He fashions it, for all his doubts, in the
-hope of hospitable eyes and ears, and in the
-hope of a sun to shine upon it. It is as ridiculous
-to argue that because Shakespeare&#8217;s is
-a democratic art it must be criticized in terms
-of democratic reaction to it as it would be to argue
-that because the United States is a democracy
-the most acute and comprehensive criticism
-of that democracy must lie in a native
-democrat&#8217;s reaction to it. &#8220;To say that the
-theatre is for the people,&#8221; says Gordon Craig,
-&#8220;is necessary. But to forget to add that part
-and parcel of the people is the aristocracy,
-whether of birth or feeling, is an omission. A
-man of the eighteenth century, dressed in silks,
-in a fashionable loggia in the theatre at Versailles,
-looking as if he did no work (as Voltaire
-in his youth may have looked), presents,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span>
-in essence, exactly the same picture as Walt
-Whitman in his rough gray suit lounging in
-the Bowery, also looking as if he did no work....
-One the aristocrat, one the democrat: the
-two are identical.&#8221;</p>
-
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>&#8220;Convictions,&#8221; said Nietzsche, &#8220;are prisons.&#8221;
-Critical &#8220;theories,&#8221; with negligible exception,
-seek to denude the arts of their splendid, gipsy
-gauds and to force them instead to don so
-many duplicated black and white striped uniforms.
-Of all the arts, drama has suffered
-most in this regard. Its critics, from the time
-of Aristotle, have bound and fettered it, and
-have then urged it impassionedly to soar.
-Yet, despite its shackles, it has triumphed, and
-each triumph has been a derision of one of its
-most famous and distinguished critics. It
-triumphed, through Shakespeare, over Aristotle;
-it triumphed, through Moli&#232;re, over Castelvetro;
-it triumphed, through Lemercier,
-over Diderot; it triumphed, through Lessing,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span>
-over Voltaire; it triumphed, through Ibsen,
-over Flaubert; it has triumphed, through
-Hauptmann, over Sarcey and, through
-Schnitzler and Bernard Shaw, over Mr.
-Archer. The truth perhaps is that drama is
-an art as flexible as the imaginations of its
-audiences. It is no more to be bound by rules
-and theories than such imaginations are to be
-bound by rules and theories. Who so all-wise
-that he may say by what rules or set of
-rules living imaginations and imaginations yet
-unborn are to be fanned into theatrical flame?
-&#8220;Imagination,&#8221; Samuel Johnson&#8217;s words apply
-to auditor as to artist, &#8220;a licentious and vagrant
-faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and
-impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured
-to baffle the logician, to perplex the
-confines of distinction, and burst the inclosures
-of regularity.&#8221; And further, &#8220;There is therefore
-scarcely any species of writing of which
-we can tell what is its essence, and what are
-its constituents; every new genius produces
-some innovation which, when invented and
-approved, subverts the rules which the practice<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>
-of foregoing authors had established.&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>Does the play interest, and whom? This
-seems to me to be the only doctrine of dramatic
-criticism that is capable of supporting itself
-soundly. First, does the play interest? In
-other words, how far has the dramatist succeeded
-in expressing himself, and the materials
-before him, intelligently, eloquently, symmetrically,
-beautifully? So much for the criticism
-of the dramatist as an artist. In the
-second place, whom does the play interest?
-Does it interest inferior persons, or does it
-interest cultivated and artistically sensitive
-persons? So much for the criticism of the
-artist as a dramatist.</p>
-
-<p>The major difficulty with critics of the
-drama has always been that, having once positively
-enunciated their critical credos, they
-have been constrained to devote their entire
-subsequent enterprise and ingenuity to defending
-the fallacies therein. Since a considerable
-number of these critics have been, and are,
-extraordinarily shrewd and ingenious men,
-these defences of error have often been contrived<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>
-with such persuasive dexterity and reasonableness
-that they have endured beyond the
-more sound doctrines of less deft critics, doctrines
-which, being sound, have suffered the
-rebuffs that gaunt, grim logic, ever unprepossessing
-and unhypnotic, suffers always. &#8220;I
-hope that I am right; if I am not right, I am
-still right,&#8221; said Bruneti&#232;re. &#8220;Mr. William
-Archer is not only, like myself, a convinced,
-inflexible determinist,&#8221; Henry Arthur Jones
-has written, &#8220;I am persuaded that he is also,
-unlike myself, a consistent one. I am sure he
-takes care that his practice agrees with his
-opinions&mdash;even when they are wrong.&#8221; Dramatic
-criticism is an attempt to formulate rules
-of conduct for the lovable, wayward, charming,
-wilful vagabond that is the drama. For the
-drama is an art with a feather in its cap and
-an ironic smile upon its lips, sauntering impudently
-over forbidden lawns and through
-closed lanes into the hearts of those of us
-children of the world who have never grown
-up. Beside literature, it is the Mother Goose
-of the arts: a gorgeous and empurpled Mother<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>
-Goose for the fireside of impressible and romantic
-youth that, looking upward, leans ever
-hushed and expectant at the knee of life. It
-is a fairy tale told realistically, a true story
-told as romance. It is the lullaby of disillusion,
-the chimes without the cathedral, the
-fears and hopes and dreams and passions of
-those who cannot fully fear and hope and
-dream and flame of themselves.</p>
-
-<p>&#8220;The drama must have reality,&#8221; so Mr. P.
-P. Howe in his engaging volume of &#8220;Dramatic
-Portraits,&#8221; &#8220;but the first essential to our
-understanding of an art is that we should not
-believe it to be actual life. The spectator who
-shouts his warning and advice to the heroine
-when the villain is approaching is, in the theatre,
-the only true believer in the hand of God;
-and he is liable to find it in a drama lower than
-the best.&#8221; The art of the drama is one which
-imposes upon drama the obligation of depicting
-at once the inner processes of life realistically,
-and the external aspects of life delusively.
-Properly and sympathetically to appreciate
-drama, one must look upon it synchronously<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>
-with two different eyes: the one arguing
-against the other as to the truth of what it
-sees, and triumphing over this doubtful other
-with the full force of its sophistry. Again inevitably
-to quote Coleridge, &#8220;Stage presentations
-are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith,
-which the spectator encourages in himself
-and supports by a voluntary contribution
-on his own part, because he knows that it is
-at all times in his power to see the thing as it
-really is. Thus the true stage illusion as to a
-forest scene consists, not in the mind&#8217;s judging
-it to be a forest, but in its remission of the
-judgment that it is not a forest.&#8221; This obviously
-applies to drama as well as to dramatic
-investiture. One never for a moment
-believes absolutely that Mr. John Barrymore
-is Richard III; one merely agrees, for the
-sake of Shakespeare, who has written the play,
-and Mr. Hopkins, who has cast it, that Mr.
-John Barrymore is Richard III, that one may
-receive the ocular, aural and mental sensations
-for which one has paid three dollars and
-a half. Nor does one for a moment believe<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span>
-that Mr. Walter Hampden, whom that very
-evening one has seen dividing a brobdingnagian
-dish of goulash with Mr. Oliver Herford
-in the Player&#8217;s Club and discussing the prospects
-of the White Sox, is actually speaking
-extemporaneously the rare verbal embroideries
-of Shakespeare; or that Miss Ethel Barrymore
-who is billed in front of Browne&#8217;s Chop
-House to take a star part in the Actors&#8217;
-Equity Association&#8217;s benefit, is really the
-queen of a distant kingdom.</p>
-
-<p>The dramatist, in the theatre, is not a
-worker in actualities, but in the essence of actualities
-that filters through the self-deception
-of his spectators. There is no such thing
-as realism in the theatre: there is only mimicry
-of realism. There is no such thing as
-romance in the theatre: there is only mimicry
-of romance. There is no such thing as
-an automatic dramatic susceptibility in a theatre
-audience: there is only a volitional dramatic
-susceptibility. Thus, it is absurd to
-speak of the drama holding the mirror up to
-nature; all that the drama can do is to hold<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>
-nature up to its own peculiar mirror which,
-like that in a pleasure-park carousel, amusingly
-fattens up nature, or shrinks it, yet does
-not at any time render it unrecognizable.
-One does not go to the theatre to see life and
-nature; one goes to see the particular way in
-which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated,
-imaginative and entertaining man
-who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.
-Drama is the surprising pulling of a perfectly
-obvious, every-day rabbit out of a perfectly
-obvious, every-day silk hat. The spectator has
-seen thousands of rabbits and thousands of
-silk hats, but he has never seen a silk hat that
-had a rabbit concealed in it, and he is curious
-about it.</p>
-
-<p>But if drama is essentially mimetic, so also&mdash;as
-Professor Gilbert Murray implies&mdash;is
-criticism essentially mimetic in that it is representative
-of the work criticized. It is conceivable
-that one may criticize Mr. Ziegfeld&#8217;s
-&#8220;Follies&#8221; in terms of the &#8220;Philoctetes&#8221; of
-Theodectes&mdash;I myself have been guilty of
-even more exceptional feats; it is not only<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>
-conceivable, but of common occurrence, for
-certain of our academic American critics to
-criticize the plays of Mr. Shaw in terms of
-Scribe and Sardou, and with a perfectly
-straight face; but criticism in general is a
-chameleon that takes on something of the
-colour of the pattern upon which it imposes
-itself. There is drama in Horace&#8217;s &#8220;Epistola
-ad Pisones,&#8221; a criticism of drama. There
-is the spirit of comedy in Hazlitt&#8217;s essay &#8220;On
-the Comic Writers of the Last Century.&#8221;
-Dryden&#8217;s &#8220;Essay on Dramatic Poesy&#8221; is
-poetry. There is something of the music
-of Chopin in Huneker&#8217;s critical essays on
-Chopin, and some of Mary Garden&#8217;s spectacular
-histrionism in his essay on her acting.
-Walkley, criticizing &#8220;L&#8217;Enfant Prodigue,&#8221;
-uses the pen of Pierrot. Criticism, more than
-drama with her mirror toward nature, holds
-the mirror up to the nature of the work it
-criticizes. Its end is the revivification of the
-passion of art which has been spent in its behalf,
-but under the terms laid down by Plato.
-Its aim is to reconstruct a great work of art<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>
-on a diminutive scale, that eyes which are not
-capable of gazing on high may have it within
-the reach of their vision. Its aim is to play
-again all the full richness of the artist&#8217;s emotional
-organ tones, in so far as is possible, on
-the cold cerebral xylophone that is criticism&#8217;s
-deficient instrument. In the accomplishment
-of these aims, it is bound by no laws that art
-is not bound by. There is but one rule: there
-are no rules. Art laughs at locksmiths.</p>
-
-<p>It has been a favourite diversion of critics
-since Aristotle&#8217;s day to argue that drama is
-drama, whether one reads it from a printed
-page or sees it enacted in a theatre. Great
-drama, they announce, is great drama whether
-it ever be acted or not; &#8220;it speaks with the
-same voice in solitude as in crowds&#8221;; and &#8220;all
-the more then&#8221;&mdash;again I quote Mr. Spingarn&mdash;&#8220;will
-the drama itself &#8216;even apart from representation
-and actors,&#8217; as old Aristotle puts
-it, speak with its highest power to the imagination
-fitted to understand and receive
-it.&#8221; Upon this point of view much of the
-academic criticism of drama has been based.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>
-But may we not well reply that, for all
-the fact that Shakespeare would still be the
-greatest dramatist who ever lived had he
-never been played in the theatre, so, too,
-would Bach still be the greatest composer who
-ever lived had his compositions never been
-played at all? If drama is not meant for actors,
-may we not also argue that music is not
-meant for instruments? Are not such expedients
-less sound criticism than clever evasion
-of sound criticism: a frolicsome and agreeable
-straddling of the &#230;sthetic see-saw? There is
-the printed drama&mdash;criticize it. There is the
-same drama acted&mdash;criticize it. Why quibble?
-Sometimes, as in the case of &#8220;Gioconda&#8221;
-and Duse, they are one. Well and
-good. Sometimes, as in the case of &#8220;Chantecler&#8221;
-and Maude Adams, they are not one.
-Well and good. But where, in either case,
-the confusion that the critics lay such stress
-upon? These critics deal not with theories,
-but with mere words. They take two dozen
-empty words and adroitly seek therewith to
-fashion a fecund theory. The result is&mdash;words.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>
-&#8220;Words which,&#8221; said Ruskin, &#8220;if
-they are not watched, will do deadly work
-sometimes. There are masked words droning
-and skulking about us just now ... (there
-never were so many, owing to the teaching
-of catechisms and phrases at school instead of
-human meanings) ... there never were creatures
-of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists
-so cunning, never poisoners so deadly,
-as these masked words: they are the unjust
-stewards of men&#8217;s ideas....&#8221;</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span></p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>
-<p class="ph2">III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE</p>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span></p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span>
-<h2 class="nobreak">III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p class="drop-cap">THE theatre stands in relation to drama
-much as the art gallery stands in relation
-to painting. Its aim is to set off
-drama in such surroundings and in such light
-as to bring it within the comfortable vision and
-agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To
-say that fine drama may produce an equal effect
-read as acted may be true or not as you
-choose, but so too a fine painting may produce
-an equal effect beheld in one&#8217;s library as in
-the Uffizi. Art thrives&mdash;art leads to art&mdash;on
-sympathy and a measure of general understanding.
-Otherwise, of what use criticism?
-To divorce the theatre from a consideration
-of drama as an art, to contend, as it has been
-contended from Aristotle&#8217;s day to Corneille&#8217;s,
-and from Dryden&#8217;s and Lamb&#8217;s to our own,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span>
-that &#8220;the more lasting and noble design&#8221; of
-drama rests in a reading rather than a seeing,
-may be, strictly, a logical &#230;sthetic man&#339;uvre,
-but equally a logical &#230;sthetic man&#339;uvre
-would be a divorcement of canvas from painting
-as an art. The theatre is the canvas of
-drama. The printed drama is like a bubbling
-and sunlit spring, encountered only by wanderers
-into the hills and awaiting the bottling
-process of the theatre to carry its tonic waters
-far and wide among an expectant and emotionally
-ill people.</p>
-
-<p>The criticism that nominates itself to hold
-drama and the theatre as things apart is a
-criticism which, for all its probable integrity
-and reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy,
-like a duchess in a play by Mr. Sydney
-Grundy. Its &#230;sthetic nose is elevated to such
-a degree that it may no longer serve as a practical
-organ of earthly smell, but merely as a
-quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry
-of the face. It is criticism in a stiff corset,
-erect, immobile, lordly&mdash;like the Prussian lieutenant
-of yesterday, a striking figure, yet just<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>
-a little absurd. It is sound, but like many
-things that are sound in &#230;sthetics, it has its
-weak points, even its confounding points. For
-they say that propaganda can have no place in
-art, and along comes a Hauptmann and writes
-a &#8220;Weavers.&#8221; Or they say that art is form,
-and along comes a Richard Strauss and composes
-two songs for baritone and orchestra
-that set the critics to a mad chasing of their
-own tails. Or, opposing criticism as an art,
-they say that &#8220;criticism is art in form, but its
-content is judgment, which takes it out of the
-intuitional world into the conceptual world&#8221;&mdash;and
-along comes an H. G. Wells with his
-&#8220;The New Machiavelli&#8221; which, like criticism,
-is art in form and its content judgment. To
-hold that the drama as an art may achieve its
-highest end read by the individual and not
-acted in the theatre, is to hold that music as
-an art may achieve its highest end played by
-but one instrument and not by an orchestra.
-The theatre is the drama&#8217;s orchestra: upon the
-wood of its boards and the wind of its puppets
-is the melody of drama in all its full richness<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>
-sounded. What if drama is art and the
-theatre not art? What if &#8220;Hamlet&#8221; is art
-and electric lights and cheese-cloth are not
-art? Schubert&#8217;s piano trio, op. 99, is art, and
-a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing
-a number of little hammers that hit an equal
-number of steel and copper wires. What if
-I can read a full imagination into &#8220;Romeo and
-Juliet&#8221; and thus people it and make it live for
-me, without going to the theatre? So, too,
-can I read a full melody into the manuscript of
-a song by Hugo Wolf and thus make it sing
-for me, without going to a concert hall. But
-why? Is there only one way to appreciate
-and enjoy art&mdash;and since when? Wagner on
-a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the
-orchestra is super-Wagner. To read a great
-drama is to play &#8220;Parsifal&#8221; on a cornet and
-an oboe.</p>
-
-<p>The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually
-maintained, a shrewd excitation of the
-imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd
-relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty
-axiom that holds the greatest actor in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span>
-theatre to be an audience&#8217;s imagination, and
-the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever
-productive of large financial return. As I
-have on more than one occasion pointed out
-from available and acutely relevant statistics,
-the more a dramatist relies upon the imagination,
-of an audience, the less the box-office
-reward that is his. An audience fills a theatre
-auditorium not so eager to perform with its
-imagination as to have its imagination performed
-upon. This is not the paradox it may
-superficially seem to be. The difference is
-the difference between a prompt commercial
-failure like Molnar&#8217;s &#8220;Der Gardeofficier&#8221;
-(&#8220;Where Ignorance Is Bliss&#8221;) which asks an
-audience to perform with its imagination and
-a great commercial success like Barrie&#8217;s
-&#8220;Peter Pan&#8221; which performs upon the audience&#8217;s
-imagination by supplying to it every
-detail of imagination, ready-made and persuasively
-labelled. The theatre is not a place to
-which one goes in search of the unexplored
-corners of one&#8217;s imagination; it is a place to
-which one goes in repeated search of the familiar<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span>
-corners of one&#8217;s imagination. The moment
-the dramatist works in the direction of
-unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily
-enough, is granted by the very critics
-who hold to the imagination fallacy which I
-have just described. They unanimously agree
-that a dramatist&#8217;s most successful cultivation
-of an audience lies in what they term, and
-nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the
-same breath paradoxically contend that sudden
-imaginative shock is a desideratum no less.</p>
-
-<p>In this pleasant remission of the active imagination
-lies one of the secrets of the charm
-of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in
-this. On even the higher plane of the authentic
-arts a measure of the same phenomenon
-assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly
-be termed the negative stimulation of the
-spectator&#8217;s fancy. For all the pretty and
-winning words to the contrary, no person capable
-of sound introspection will admit that a
-beautiful painting like Giorgione&#8217;s &#8220;The Concert&#8221;
-or a beautiful piece of sculpture like
-Pisano&#8217;s Perugian fountain actually and literally<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>
-stirs his imagination, and sets it a-sail
-across hitherto uncharted &#230;sthetic seas. What
-such a painting or piece of sculpture does is to
-reach out and, with its overpowering beauty,
-encompass and &#230;sthetically fence in the antecedent
-wandering and uncertain imagination
-of its spectator. As in the instance of drama,
-it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination
-as soothe an imagination already awake.
-Of all the arts, music alone remains a telegrapher
-of unborn dreams.</p>
-
-<p>The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete
-movement, concrete colour, and concrete
-final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor
-particulars. The art of drama suffers, true
-enough, when the theatre, even at its finest,
-is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic
-in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle
-on Bosworth Field, or in its ship torn by the
-tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer
-night, or in its approaching tread of doom of
-the gods of the mountain. But for each such
-defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the
-theatre brings to it. Such gifts as the leader<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span>
-Craig has brought to the furtherance of the
-beauty of &#8220;Electra&#8221; and &#8220;Hamlet,&#8221; as Reinhardt
-and his aides have brought to &#8220;Ariadne&#8221;
-and &#8220;Julius C&#230;sar,&#8221; as Golovine and Appia
-and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen
-others have brought to the classics that have
-called to them, are not small ones. They have
-crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so
-many loose jewels and given them substantial
-and appropriate settings which have fittingly
-posed their radiance. To say that the reading
-imagination of the average cultured man is
-superior in power of suggestion and depiction
-to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically
-to say that the reading imagination of every
-average cultured man is superior in these powers
-to the combined theatrical imaginations of
-Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt and Eleanora
-Duse operating jointly upon the same play.
-Even a commonplace imagination can successfully
-conjure up a landscape more beautiful
-than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough,
-or jewels more opalescent than any painted by
-Rembrandt, or a woman&#8217;s dress more luminous<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span>
-than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs
-more beguiling than any of Rubens&#8217;, yet who
-so foolish to say&mdash;as they are wont foolishly to
-say of reading imagination and the drama&mdash;that
-such an imagination is therefore superior
-to that of the artists? This, in essence, is
-none the less the serious contention of those
-who decline to reconcile themselves to the
-theatrically produced drama. This contention,
-reduced to its skeleton, is that, since the
-vice-president of the Corn Exchange Bank
-can picture the chamber in the outbuilding adjoining
-Gloster&#8217;s castle more greatly to his
-satisfaction than Adolphe Appia can picture
-it for him on the stage, the mental performance
-of the former is therefore a finer artistic
-achievement than the stage performance of
-the latter.</p>
-
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>The word imagination leads critics to queer
-antics. It is, perhaps, the most manhandled
-word in our critical vocabulary. It is used<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span>
-almost invariably in its literal meaning: no
-shades and shadows are vouchsafed to it.
-Imagination, in good truth, is not the basis of
-art, but an overtone. Many an inferior artist
-has a greater imagination than many a superior
-artist. Maeterlinck&#8217;s imagination is much
-richer than Hauptmann&#8217;s, Erik Satie&#8217;s is
-much richer than C&#233;sar Franck&#8217;s, and I am
-not at all certain that Romain Rolland&#8217;s is not
-twice as opulent as Thomas Hardy&#8217;s. Imagination
-is the slave of the true artist, the master
-of the weak. The true artist beats imagination
-with the cat-o&#8217;-nine-tails of his individual
-technic until it cries out in pain, and this pain
-is the work of art which is born. The inferior
-craftsman comfortably confounds imagination
-with the finished work, and so pets and
-coddles it; and imagination&#8217;s resultant mincings
-and giggles he then vaingloriously sets
-forth as resolute art.</p>
-
-<p>The theatre offers to supplement, embroider
-and enrich the imagination of the reader of
-drama with the imaginations of the actor, the
-scene designer, the musician, the costumer and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>
-the producing director. Each of these, before
-he sets himself to his concrete task, has&mdash;like
-the lay reader&mdash;sought the fruits of his own
-reading imagination. The fruits of these five
-reading imaginations are then assembled,
-carefully assorted, and the most worthy of
-them deftly burbanked. The final staging of
-the drama is merely a staging of these best
-fruits of the various reading imaginations.
-To say, against this, that it is most often impossible
-to render a reading imagination into
-satisfactory concrete forms is doubtless to say
-what is, strictly, true. But art itself is at its
-highest merely an approach toward limitless
-imagination and beauty. &#198;sthetics is a pilgrim
-on the road to a Mecca that is ever just
-over the sky-line. Of how many great works
-of art can one say, with complete and final
-conviction, that art in this particular direction
-can conceivably go no farther? Is it not
-conceivable that some super-Michelangelo
-will some day fashion an even more perfect
-&#8220;Slave,&#8221; and some super-Shakespeare an even
-more beautiful poetic drama?</p>
-
-
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>The detractors of the theatre are often expert
-in persuasive half-truths and masters of
-dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their performances
-are often so adroit that the spectator is
-quick to believe that the trunk is really empty,
-yet the false bottom is there for all its cunning
-concealment. Take, for example, George
-Moore, in the preface to his last play, &#8220;The
-Coming of Gabrielle.&#8221; &#8220;The illusion created
-by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and
-short sentences is in itself illusory,&#8221; he professes
-to believe, though why he numbers the
-dramatist&#8217;s short sentences among the externals
-of the stage is not quite clear. &#8220;The best
-performances of plays and operas are witnessed
-at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was
-never so like Tristan at night as he was in the
-afternoon when he sang the part in a short
-jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his
-hand. The chain armour and the plumes that
-he wore at night were but a distraction, setting
-our thoughts on periods, on the short swords
-in use in the ninth century in Ireland or in
-Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>
-the ships in which the lovers were voyaging,
-on the absurd night-dress which is the convention
-that Isolde should appear in, a garment
-she never wore and which we know to be make-believe.
-But the hat and feathers that Isolde
-appears in when she rehearses the part are
-forgotten the moment she sings; and if I had
-to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play Hamlet
-or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate
-for a moment. The moment he speaks he
-ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose
-the illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince
-of Denmark and remember the mummer.&#8221;
-Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given
-the title &#8220;Another Book on the Theatre,&#8221; I
-took a boyish delight in setting off precisely
-the same noisy firework just to hear the folks
-in the piazza rocking-chairs let out a yell.
-These half-truths serve criticism as sauce
-serves asparagus: they give tang to what is
-otherwise often tasteless food. This is particularly
-true with criticism at its most geometrical
-and profound, since such criticism, save
-in rare instances, is not especially lively reading.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span>
-But, nevertheless, the sauce is not the
-asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless
-with his tongue in his cheek) observes that
-he can much more readily imagine the lusty
-Frau Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink
-and green ostrich feather hat confected in
-some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary
-stage trappings, he allows, by implication,
-that he might even more readily imagine
-the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen
-if she had no clothes on at all.</p>
-
-<p>This is the trouble with paradoxes. It is
-not that they prove too little, as is believed
-of them, but that they prove altogether too
-much. If the illusion created by stage externals
-is in itself illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the
-complete deletion of all such stage externals
-should be the best means for providing absolute
-illusion. Yet the complete absence of illusion
-where this is the case is all too familiar
-to any of us who have looked on such spectacles
-as &#8220;The Bath of Phryne&#8221; and the like in
-the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of stage
-externals does not contribute to disillusion,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>
-but to illusion. These externals have become,
-through protracted usage, so familiar that
-they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are
-taken by the eye for granted. By way of
-proof, one need only consider two types of
-Shakespearian production, one like that of
-Mr. Robert Mantell and one like that lately
-employed for &#8220;Macbeth&#8221; by Mr. Arthur
-Hopkins. Where the overladen stereotyped
-first production paradoxically fades out of the
-picture for the spectator and leaves the path
-of illusion clear for him, the superlatively
-simple second production, almost wholly
-bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes
-his attention and makes illusion impossible.
-It is true, of course, that all this may be
-changed in time, when the deletion of externals
-by the new stagecraft shall have become
-a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on
-of externals is a convention at present.
-But, as things are today, these externals are,
-negatively, the most positive contributors to
-illusion.</p>
-
-<p>It is the misfortune of the theatre that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>
-critics have almost always approached it, and
-entered it, with a defiant and challenging air.
-I have, during the eighteen years of my active
-critical service, met with and come to know at
-least fifty professional critics in America, in
-England and on the Continent, and among all
-this number there have been but four who have
-approached the theatre enthusiastically prejudiced
-in its favour&mdash;two of them asses.
-But between the one large group that has been
-critically hostile and the other smaller group
-that has been uncritically effervescent, I have
-encountered no sign of calm and reasoned
-compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent
-willingness to regard each and every theatre
-as a unit, and so to be appraised, instead of
-lumping together good and bad theatres alike
-and labelling the heterogeneous mass &#8220;the
-theatre.&#8221; There is no such thing as &#8220;the
-theatre.&#8221; There is this theatre, that theatre,
-and still that other theatre. Each is a unit.
-To talk of &#8220;the theatre&#8221; is to talk of the Greek
-theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern
-theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>
-of the Grosses Schauspielhaus of
-Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of
-Mr. A. H. Woods. &#8220;The theatre,&#8221; of course,
-has certain more or less minor constant and
-enduring conventions&mdash;at least, so it seems as
-far as we now can tell&mdash;but so, too, has chirography,
-yet we do not speak of &#8220;the chirography.&#8221;
-There are some theatres&mdash;I use the
-word in its proper restricted sense&mdash;that
-glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there
-are others that vitiate drama. But so also are
-there some men who write fine drama, and
-others who debase drama to mere fodder for
-witlings.... The Shakespeare of the theatre
-of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant beauty.
-Call it art or not art as you will&mdash;what does a
-label matter? The Moli&#232;re of the theatre of
-Alexander Golovine is suggestive and exquisite
-enchantment. Call it art or not art as
-you will&mdash;what does a label matter? The
-Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert
-is triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call
-it anything you like&mdash;and again, what does a
-label matter? There are too many labels in
-the world.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span></p>
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>
-
-<p class="ph2">IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING</p>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span></p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>
-<h2 class="nobreak">IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p class="drop-cap">&#8220;WHEN Mr. Nathan says that acting
-is not an art, of course he is talking
-arrant rot&mdash;who could doubt it,
-after witnessing a performance by the great
-Duse?&#8221; So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold
-Daly. Whether acting is or is not an art, it
-is not my concern at the moment to consider,
-yet I quote the <i>riposte</i> of Mr. Daly as perhaps
-typical of those who set themselves as defenders
-of the yea theory. It seems to me that
-if this is a satisfactory <i>touche</i> no less satisfactory
-should be some such like rejoinder as:
-&#8220;When Mr. Nathan says that acting <i>is</i> an art,
-of course he is talking arrant rot&mdash;who could
-doubt it, after witnessing a performance by
-Mr. Corse Payton.&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>If an authentic art is anything which may
-properly be founded upon an exceptionally<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>
-brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the
-Reverend Doctor Ernest M. Stires&#8217; brilliant
-performance in it, is pulpiteering an art, and,
-on the strength of Miss Bird Millman&#8217;s brilliant
-performance in it, is tight-rope walking
-an art no less. Superficially a mere dialectic
-monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd
-as it may seem, for if Duse&#8217;s art lies in the
-fact that she breathes life and dynamic effect
-into the written word of the artist D&#8217;Annunzio,
-Stires&#8217; lies in the more substantial fact
-that he breathes life and dynamic effect into
-the word of the somewhat greater, and more
-evasive artist, God. And Miss Millman, too,
-brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour,
-rhythm, beauty and&mdash;one may even say&mdash;a
-sense of fantastic character, since the effect
-she contrives is less that of a dumpy little
-woman in a short white skirt pirouetting on a
-taut wire than of an unreal creature, half bird,
-half woman, out of some forgotten fable.</p>
-
-<p>The circumstance that Duse is an artist
-who happens to be an actress does not make
-acting an art any more than the circumstance<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>
-that Villon was an artist who happened to be
-a burglar or that Paderewski is an artist who
-happens to be a politician makes burglary and
-politics arts. Duse is an artist first, and an
-actress second: one need only look into her
-very great share in the creation of the dramas
-bearing the name of D&#8217;Annunzio to reconcile
-one&#8217;s self&mdash;if not too stubborn, at least in part&mdash;to
-this point of view. So, also, were
-Clairon, Rachel and Jane Hading artists
-apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah
-Bernhardt: who can fail to detect the creative
-artist in the &#8220;M&#233;moires&#8221; of the first named, for
-instance, or, in the case of the last named, in
-the fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture,
-painting and dramatic literature? It is a curious
-thing that, in all the pronouncements of
-acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates
-as representative carriers of the &#230;sthetic
-banner are those of actors and actresses who
-have most often offered evidence of artistic
-passion in fields separate and apart from their
-histrionic endeavours. Lema&#238;tre, Salvini,
-Rachel, Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span>
-Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts, Irving, Tree,
-and on down&mdash;far down&mdash;the line to Ditrichstein,
-Sothern, Marie Tempest, Guitry,
-Gemier and the brothers Barrymore&mdash;all give
-testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship,
-poetry and dramatic authorship to &#230;sthetic
-impulses other than acting. Since acting
-itself as an art is open to question, the merit or
-demerit of the performances produced from
-the &#230;sthetic impulses in point is not an issue:
-the fact seems to be that it has been the artist
-who has become the actor rather than the actor
-who has become the artist.</p>
-
-<p>The actor, as I have on another occasion
-hazarded, is the child of the miscegenation of
-an art and a trade: of the drama and the
-theatre. Since acting must appeal to the
-many&mdash;this is obviously its only reason for being,
-for acting is primarily a filter through
-which drama may be lucidly distilled for
-heterogeneous theatre-goers&mdash;it must, logically,
-be popular or perish. Surely no authentic
-art can rest or thrive upon such a premise.
-The great actors and actresses, unlike<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span>
-great fashioners in other arts, have invariably
-been favourites of the crowd, and it is doubtless
-a too charitable hypothesis to assume that
-this crowd has ever been gifted with critical
-insight beyond cavil. If, therefore, the actor
-or actress who can sway great crowds is
-strictly to be termed an artist, why may we not
-also, by strict definition, similarly term as exponents
-of an authentic art others who can
-likewise sway the same crowds: a great politician
-like Roosevelt, say, or a great lecturer
-like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian
-like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out
-these paradox shock-troops to clear the way
-for the more sober infantry.)</p>
-
-<p>I have said that I have no intention to argue
-for or against acting as an art yet, for all the
-circumstance that the case for the prosecution
-has long seemed the soundest and the most
-eloquent, there are still sporadic instances of
-imaginative histrionism that give one reason to
-ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently
-come to the more penetrating critic that what
-has on such occasions passed for an art has in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>
-reality been merely a reflected art: the art of
-drama interpreted not with the imagination
-of the actor but, more precisely, <i>with the imagination
-of the dramatist</i>. In other words,
-that actor or actress is the most competent and
-effective whose imagination is successful in
-meeting literally, and translating, the imagination
-of the dramatist which has created the
-r&#244;le played by the particular actor or actress.
-To name the actor&#8217;s imagination in such a case
-a creative imagination is a rather wistful procedure,
-for it does not create but merely duplicates.
-Surely no advocate of acting as a creative
-art would be so bold as to contend that
-any actor, however great, has ever brought
-creative imagination to the already full and
-superb creative imagination of Shakespeare.
-This would be, on an actor&#8217;s part, the sheerest
-impudence. The greatest actor is simply he
-who is best fitted by figure, voice, training
-and intelligence not to invade and annul the
-power of the r&#244;le which a great dramatist has
-imagined and created. Duse and D&#8217;Annunzio
-were, so to speak, spiritually and physically<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>
-one: hence the unmatched perfection of
-the former&#8217;s histrionism in the latter&#8217;s r&#244;les.
-To see Duse is, save one admit one&#8217;s self
-critically to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical
-art doubts and the convictions of such
-as Mr. Daly.</p>
-
-<p>It is, of course, the common habit of the
-prejudiced critic to overlook, in the estimate
-of acting as an art, the few admirable exponents
-of acting and to take into convenient
-consideration only the enormous majority of
-incompetents. But to argue that acting is
-not an art simply because a thousand Edmund
-Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give no evidence
-that it is an art is to argue that sculpture
-is not an art simply because a thousand
-fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris
-busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding
-give no evidence in a like direction. Yet the
-circumstance that there are admittedly excellent
-actors as well as bad actors establishes acting
-as an art no more than the circumstance
-that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers
-as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>
-the playing of the cuckoo-whistle as
-an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison
-to what appears to be an absurdity, it is because
-by such absurdities, or elementals, is the
-status of acting in the field of the arts most
-sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt&#8217;s
-ever-haunting cry of the heart in &#8220;Izeyl&#8221; is a
-peg, however slight, upon which may be hung
-a strand of the theory that maintains acting as
-an art, so too, by the strict canon of dialectics,
-is Mr. Ruben Katz&#8217;s ever-haunting cry of the
-cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of
-Beethoven&#8217;s Pastoral Symphony.</p>
-
-<p>If acting is an art, the proofs thus far
-offered are not only unconvincing but fundamentally,
-on the score of logic, not a little
-droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If
-criticism is an art (thus a familiar contention),
-why is not acting also an art, since both are
-concerned with re-creating works of art? But
-the artist&#8217;s work offered up to the critic is a
-challenge, whereas the dramatist&#8217;s work
-offered up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism
-is war, whether in behalf of &#230;sthetic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>
-friend or against &#230;sthetic foe; acting is agreement,
-peace. The critic re-creates, in terms
-of his own personality, the work of another
-and often emphatically different and antagonistic
-personality. The actor re-creates, in
-terms of a dramatist&#8217;s concordantly imagined
-personality, his own personality: the result
-is less re-creation than non-re-creation. In
-other words, the less the actor creates or re-creates
-and the more he remains simply an
-adaptable tool in the hands of the dramatist,
-the better actor he is. The actor&#8217;s state is
-thus what may be termed one of active impassivity.
-Originality and independence, save
-within the narrowest of limits, are denied him.
-He is a literal translator of a work of art, not
-an independently imaginative and speculative
-interpreter, as the critic is. The dramatist&#8217;s
-work of art does not say to him, as to the critic,
-&#8220;Here I am! What do you, out of all your
-experience, taste and training, think of me?&#8221;
-It says to him, instead and peremptorily,
-&#8220;Here I am! Think of me exactly as I am,
-and adapt all of your experience, taste and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>
-training to the interpretation of me exactly as
-I am!&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>Brushing aside the theory that the true
-artist is the actor who can transform his voice,
-his manner, his character; who will disappear
-behind his part instead of imposing himself
-on it and adding himself to it&mdash;a simple feat,
-since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli
-and Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean
-actors, are true histrionic artists&mdash;Mr.
-Walkley, in his essay on &#8220;The English Actor
-of Today,&#8221; bravely takes up the defence from
-what he regards as a more difficult approach.
-&#8220;In the art of acting as in any other art,&#8221; he
-says, &#8220;the first requisite is life. The actor&#8217;s
-part is a series of speeches and stage directions,
-mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be
-raised somehow from the dead. If the actor
-disappears behind it, there is nothing left but
-a Golgotha.&#8221; Here is indeed gay news!
-Hamlet, Iago, Romeo, Shylock&mdash;mere &#8220;cold
-print,&#8221; inert Shakespearian masses that, in
-order to live, have to be raised somehow from
-the dead by members of the Lambs&#8217; Club! It<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span>
-is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly
-takes to cover after launching this torpedo,
-and devotes the balance of his interesting comments
-to a prudent and circumspect <i>pas seul</i>
-on the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter.
-For no sooner has he described the
-majestic drama of Shakespeare as &#8220;mere cold
-print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow
-from the dead,&#8221; than he seems suddenly,
-and not without a touch of horror, to realize
-that he has ridiculously made of Shakespeare a
-mere blank canvas and pot of paint for the use
-of this or that actor whom he has named, by
-implication and with magnificent liberalness,
-a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble for
-the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined
-Merci&#233;.</p>
-
-
-<h3>II</h3>
-
-<p>Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable
-art takes its key from R&#233;mond de
-Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman
-whose pragmatic critical credo was, &#8220;If
-it makes me feel, it is art.&#8221; While it may be
-reasonable that a purely emotional art may<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span>
-aptly be criticized according to the degree of
-emotional reaction which it induces, it is the
-quality of emotion resident in the critic that
-offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion.
-A perfectly attuned and sound emotional
-equipment&mdash;an emotional equipment of
-absolute pitch, so to speak&mdash;is a rare thing,
-even among critics of brilliant intelligence,
-taste, imagination and experience. Goethe,
-Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention
-only five, were physio-psychological units of
-dubious emotional structure, if we may trust
-the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of
-their critical dramatic writing may be accepted
-without qualm, a distinct measure of distrust
-would attach itself to any critical estimate of
-acting which they might have written or actually
-did write.</p>
-
-<p>There are, obviously, more or less definite
-standards whereby we may estimate critical
-writings of such men as these so far as those
-criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe
-as the cerebral or semi-cerebral arts, but
-there are no standards, even remotely determinable
-or exact, whereby we may appraise<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>
-such of their criticisms as deal with the directly
-and wholly emotional art of acting. It is perhaps
-not too far a cry to assume that had Mr.
-William Archer&#8217;s father been murdered
-shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr.
-Forbes-Robertson&#8217;s Hamlet, Mr. Archer
-would have been moved to believe Mr. Forbes-Robertson
-on even greater actor-artist than he
-believed him under the existing circumstances,
-or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius, the Danish
-journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a
-victim of syphilis when he reviewed August
-Lindberg&#8217;s &#8220;Oswald,&#8221; he would have looked
-on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive
-exponent of histrionism. Nothing is more
-&#230;sthetically and artistically dubious and insecure
-than the appraisal of acting; for it is
-based upon the quicksands of varying human
-emotionalism, and of aural and visual prejudice.
-Were I, for example, one hundred times
-more proficient a critic of drama and life than
-I am, my criticism of acting would none the
-less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I
-would remain constitutionally an&#230;sthetic to a
-Juliet, however otherwise talented, who had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>
-piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all
-his histrionic power, presented to the vision a
-pair of knock-knees. This, I well appreciate,
-is the kind of critical writing that is promptly
-set down as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as
-I am concerned and I daresay that it is, in one
-direction or another, the truth so far as the
-majority of critics are concerned.</p>
-
-<p>The most that may be said of the soundness
-of this or that laudatory criticism of an actor&#8217;s
-performance is that the performance in point
-has met exactly&mdash;or very nearly&mdash;the particular
-critic&#8217;s personal notion of how he, as a
-human being, would have cried, laughed and
-otherwise comported himself were he an actor
-and were he in the actor&#8217;s r&#244;le. The opposite,
-or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds
-a similar truth. If this is not true, by what
-standards <i>can</i> the critic estimate the actor&#8217;s
-performance? By the standards of the actors
-who have preceded this actor in the playing
-of the r&#244;le, you say? What if the r&#244;le is a
-new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has
-not been played before? Again, you say that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>
-the r&#244;le may be in an alien drama and that
-the actor may be an alien, both r&#244;le and
-performance being foreign to the emotional
-equipment of the critic. But basic emotions,
-the foundation of drama, are universal.
-Still again, what of such dramas as &#8220;&#338;dipus
-Rex,&#8221; what of such r&#244;les&mdash;this with a triumphant
-chuckle on your part? I return the
-chuckle, and bid you read the criticisms that
-have been written of the actors who have
-played in these r&#244;les! Invariably the actors
-have been treated in precisely the same terms
-and by the same standards as if they were
-playing, not in the drama of the fifth century
-before Christ, but in &#8220;Fedora,&#8221; &#8220;The Face in
-the Moonlight&#8221; or &#8220;The Count of Monte
-Cristo.&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>One cannot imagine sound criticism applying
-to any authentic art the standard of actor
-criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true
-enough, is always more or less personal, but,
-in its operation upon the authentic arts, its
-personality is ever like a new bottle into which
-the vintage wine of art has been poured.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>
-Criticism of the authentic arts is the result of
-the impact of a particular art upon a particular
-critical personality. Criticism of the dubious
-art of acting is the result of the impact of
-a particular critical personality upon this or
-that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely
-true, you inquire ironically, what of
-such an excellent instance of acting as Mimi
-Aguglia&#8217;s &#8220;Salome&#8221;; how in God&#8217;s name may
-the critic appraise that performance in the
-manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself
-were he a stage performer? Well, for all the
-surface humours of the question, that is actually
-more or less the way in which he does
-appraise it. The actor or actress, unlike the
-artist in more authentic fields, may never interpret
-emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the
-critic: the interpretation must be a reflection,
-more or less stereotyped, of the critic&#8217;s repertoire
-of emotions. Thus, where art is original
-expression, acting is merely the audible expression
-of a silent expression. In another
-phrase, expression in acting is predicated
-upon, and limited by, the expression of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>
-critic. It is, therefore, a mere duplication of
-expression. And what holds true in the case
-of the critic so far as acting is concerned obviously
-holds doubly true in the case of the uncritical
-public.</p>
-
-<p>Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting,
-I come to the conclusion that the word
-&#8220;art&#8221; has almost uniformly been applied to
-acting by critics who, thinking that they had
-perhaps belaboured the subject a trifle too
-severely, were disposed graciously to throw it
-a sop. As good an illustration as any may be
-had from Lewes, certainly a friend of acting
-if ever there was one. Thus Lewes:</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-
-<p>&#8220;The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an
-actor because we judge only from the effect he
-produces, without inquiring too curiously into the
-means. But, while the painter has nothing but his
-canvas and the author has nothing but white paper
-and printers&#8217; ink with which to produce his effects,
-the actor has all other arts as handmaids; the
-poet labours for him, creates his part, gives him
-his eloquence, his music, his imagery, his tenderness,
-his pathos, his sublimity; the scene-painter aids
-him; the costumes, the lights, the music, all the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>
-fascination of the stage&mdash;all subserve the actor&#8217;s
-effects; these raise him upon a pedestal; remove
-them, and what is he? He who can make a stage
-mob bend and sway with his eloquence, what could
-he do with a real mob, no poet by to prompt
-him? He who can charm us with the stateliest
-imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the sables
-of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can
-he do in coat and trousers on the world&#8217;s stage?
-Rub off the paint, and the eyes are no longer
-brilliant! Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value,
-and then weigh him with the rivals whom he surpasses
-in reputation and fortune.... If my
-estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower
-than seems generally current, it is from no desire
-to disparage <i>an art</i> I have always loved; but,
-etc., etc.&#8221;</p></div>
-
-<p>You will find the same dido in most of the
-essays on acting: a protracted series of cuffs
-and slaps terminating in a gentle non-sequitur
-kiss.</p>
-
-<p>Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing
-hypnosis; it is not to be wondered at
-that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken
-it for a more exalted something than it
-intrinsically is. The flame and fire of a Duse,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>
-the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful
-stage sense of creation of a Moissi&mdash;these
-are not a little befuddling. And, under
-their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible
-that the critic should confound effect
-and cause. Yet acting, even of the highest
-order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain
-of a Hermann or a Kellar with a Shakespeare
-or a Moli&#232;re as an assistant to hand over, as
-the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards
-or bowl of goldfish. It is trickery raised to its
-most exalted level: a combination of experience,
-intelligence and great charm, not revivifying
-something cold and dead, but releasing
-something quick and alive from the prison
-of the printed page.</p>
-
-<p>The actor who contends in favour of his
-creative art that he must experience within
-him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must
-actually persuade himself to feel his r&#244;le with
-all its turning smiles and tears, speaks nonsense.
-So, too, must the auditor, yet who
-would term the auditor a creative artist? The
-actor who contends in favour of his creative<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span>
-art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit, a
-creative artist since he must theatrically create
-the dramatist&#8217;s moods, illusions and emotions
-without feeling them himself, also speaks nonsense.
-For so, too, in such a case as &#8220;Electra,&#8221;
-or &#8220;Ghosts,&#8221; or &#8220;No More Blondes,&#8221;
-must the auditor, yet who, again, would term
-the latter a creative artist? The actor who
-contends in favour of his creative art that two
-accomplished actors often &#8220;create&#8221; the same
-r&#244;le in an entirely different manner, speaks
-nonsense yet again. For what is not creation
-in the first place does not become creation
-merely because it is multiplied by two. The
-actor who further contends in behalf of his
-creative art that if effective acting were the
-mere trickery that some maintain it to be, any
-person ordinarily gifted should be able, after
-a little experiment, to give an effective stage
-performance, speaks truer than he knows.
-Some of the most remarkable performances
-on the stage of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin
-have been given by just such persons. And<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>
-there are numerous other instances. If acting
-is an art&mdash;and I do not say that it may
-not be&mdash;it at least, as an art, ill bears cross-examination
-of even the most superficial nature.</p>
-
-
-<h3>III</h3>
-
-<p>Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive
-echo of an art. It is drama&#8217;s exalted
-halloo come back to drama from the walls of
-the surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of
-acting too often mistakes the echo for the
-original voice. Although the analogy wears
-motley, criticism of this kind operates in much
-the same manner as if it were to contend that
-an approximately exact and beautiful Ben Ali
-Haggin <i>tableau vivant</i> reproduction of, say,
-Velasquez&#8217;s &#8220;The Spinners,&#8221; was creative art
-in the sense that the original is creative art.
-Acting is to the art of the drama much what
-these so-called living pictures are to the art
-of painting. If acting is to be termed an art,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span>
-it is, like the living picture, a freak art, an art
-with belladonna in its eyes and ever, even at
-its highest, a bit grotesque.</p>
-
-<p>In his defence of acting as an art equal to
-that of poetry and literature, Henry Irving
-has observed, &#8220;It has been said that acting is
-unworthy because it represents feigned emotions,
-but this censure would apply with equal
-force to poet or novelist.&#8221; But would it?
-The poet and the novelist may feign emotions,
-but it is their own active imaginations which
-feign them. The actor merely feigns passively
-the emotions which the imagination of
-the poet has actively feigned; if there is feigning,
-the actor merely parrots it. If there is
-feigned emotion in, say, the second stanza of
-Swinburne&#8217;s &#8220;Rococo,&#8221; and I mount an illuminated
-platform and recite the stanza very
-eloquently and impressively, am I precisely
-feigning the emotion of it or am I merely
-feigning the emotion that the great imagination
-of Swinburne has feigned? Feigned or
-unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come
-ready-made to the heart and lips of the actor.</p>
-
-
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>Continues Irving further: &#8220;It is the actor
-who gives body to the ideas of the highest
-dramatic literature&mdash;fire, force, and sensibility,
-without which they would remain for
-most people mere airy abstractions.&#8221; What
-one engages here is the peculiar logic that acting
-is an art since it popularizes dramatic
-literature and makes it intelligible to a majority
-of dunderheads!</p>
-
-<p>One more quotation from this actor&#8217;s defence,
-and we may pass on. &#8220;The actor&#8217;s
-work is absolutely concrete,&#8221; he challenges.
-&#8220;He is brought in every phase of his work into
-direct comparison with existing things....
-Not only must his dress be suitable to the part
-which he assumes, but his bearing must not be
-in any way antagonistic to the spirit of the
-time in which the play is fixed. The free
-bearing of the sixteenth century is distinct
-from the artificial one of the seventeenth, the
-mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless
-one of the nineteenth.... The voice
-must be modulated to the vogue of the time.
-The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span>
-is different from that of a mail-clad one&mdash;nay,
-the armour of a period ruled in real life the
-poise and bearing of the body; and all this
-must be reproduced on the stage.... <i>It cannot
-therefore be seriously put forward in the
-face of such manifold requirements that no
-Art is required for the representation of suitable
-action!</i>&#8221; The italics are those of one who
-experiences some difficulty in persuading himself
-that if Art is required for such things as
-these&mdash;dress, carriage, modulation of voice
-and carrying a sword&mdash;Art, strictly speaking,
-is no less required in the matter of going to a
-Quat&#8217;-z-Arts costume ball.</p>
-
-<p>Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not
-as art but as colourful and impressive artifice.
-Miss Margaret Anglin&#8217;s Joan of Arc is
-a more or less admirable example of acting not
-because it is art but because it is a shrewd,
-vivid and beguiling synthesis of various intrinsically
-spurious dodges: black tights to
-make stout Anglo-Saxon limbs appear Gallicly
-slender, a telescoping of words containing
-the sound of <i>s</i> to conceal a personal defect<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>
-in the structure of the upper lip, a man&#339;uvring
-of the central action up stage to emphasize,
-through a familiar trick of the theatre, the
-sympathetic frailty of the character which the
-actress herself physically lacks, two intakes of
-breath before a shout of defiance that the effect
-of the ring of the directly antecedent
-shout on the part of one of the inquisitors may
-be diminished.... An effective acting performance
-is like a great explosion; and as
-T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in
-turn made from such nitrates as potassium
-nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn derived
-from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a
-great explosion of histrionism similarly made
-and derived from numerous&mdash;and not infrequently
-ludicrous and even vulgar&mdash;basic
-elements.</p>
-
-<p>The ill-balanced species of criticism which
-appraises an histrionic performance as art on
-the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it produces,
-with no inquiry into the means whereby
-that effect is produced, might analogously,
-were it to pursue this logic, appraise similarly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span>
-as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist.
-And with logic perhaps much more
-sound. For if acting as an art is to be appraised
-in the degree of the effect it imparts
-to, and induces in, the auditor-spectator,
-surely&mdash;if there is any sense at all in such a
-method of estimate&mdash;may certain other such
-performances as I have suggested be similarly
-appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation
-of logic; whatever it may deal with&mdash;&#230;sthetics,
-emotions, what not&mdash;it cannot remove itself
-entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr.
-John Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying
-the heart and mind of his auditor-spectator
-with some such character as Fedya and
-by suggesting directly that character&#8217;s tragic
-d&#233;gringolade, he can make the auditor-spectator
-pity and cry, so too an artist&mdash;by the
-rigid canon of &#230;sthetic criticism&mdash;was Friedrich
-Anton Mesmer, who is said to have been
-able to do the same thing.</p>
-
-<p>What I attempt here is no facile paradox,
-but a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> designed to show
-up the fallacy of the prevailing method of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>
-actor criticism. In criticism of the established
-arts, there is no such antic deportment. The
-critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz
-music with those of sound music, nor the stimulations
-of open melodrama with those of
-more profound drama. From each of these
-he receives stimulations of a kind: some superficial,
-some deep. But he inquires, in each instance,
-into the means whereby the various
-stimulations were vouchsafed to him. While
-he recognizes the fact that the sudden and unexpected
-shooting off of a revolver in &#8220;Secret
-Service&#8221; produces in him a sensation of shock
-as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting
-off of a revolver in &#8220;Hedda Gabler,&#8221; he
-does not therefore promptly, and with no
-further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations
-are of an &#230;sthetic piece. Nor does he
-assume that, since the nervous effect of the
-fall to death in &#8220;The Green Goddess&#8221; and of
-the fall to death in &#8220;The Master Builder&#8221; affect
-him immediately in much the same way,
-both sensations are accordingly produced by
-sound artistic means. Nor, yet again, does he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>
-confuse the quality&mdash;nor the springs of that
-quality&mdash;of the mood of wistful pathos with
-which &#8220;Poor Butterfly&#8221; and &#8220;Porgi, Amor&#8221;
-inspire him. But this confusion persists as
-part and parcel of the bulk of the criticism of
-acting. For one Hazlitt, or Lamb, or Lewes,
-or Anatole France who retains, or has retained,
-his clear discernment before the acted drama,
-there are, and have been, a number tenfold
-who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph
-with the wonders of Josef Haydn.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>
-
-<p class="ph2">V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM</p>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span></p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>
-<h2 class="nobreak">V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p class="drop-cap2">ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY
-begins one of the best books ever written
-on the subject thus: &#8220;It is not to be
-gainsaid that the word criticism has gradually
-acquired a certain connotation of contempt....
-Every one who expresses opinions, however
-imbecile, in print calls himself a &#8216;critic.&#8217;
-The greater the ignoramus, the greater the
-likelihood of his posing as a &#8216;critic.&#8217;&#8221; An excellent
-book, as I have said, with a wealth of
-sharp talk in it, but Mr. Walkley seems to me
-to err somewhat in his preliminary assumption.
-Criticism has acquired a connotation of contempt
-less because it is practised by a majority
-of ignoramuses than because it is accepted
-at full face value by an infinitely greater majority
-of ignoramuses. It is not the mob that
-curls a lip&mdash;the mob accepts the lesser ignoramus<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span>
-at his own estimate of himself; it is the
-lonely and negligible minority man who, pausing
-musefully in the field that is the world,
-contemplates the jackasses eating the daisies.</p>
-
-<p>No man is so contemptuous of criticism as
-the well-stocked critic, just as there is no man
-so contemptuous of clothes as the man with the
-well-stocked wardrobe. It is as impossible to
-imagine a critic like Shaw not chuckling derisively
-at criticism as it is to imagine a regular
-subscriber to the <i>Weekly Review</i> not swallowing
-it whole. The experienced critic, being
-on the inside, is in a position to look into
-the heads of the less experienced, and to see
-the wheels go round. He is privy to all their
-monkeyshines, since he is privy to his own.
-Having graduated from quackery, he now
-smilingly regards others still at the trade of
-seriously advancing sure cures for &#230;sthetic
-baldness, cancer, acne and trifacial neuralgia.
-And while the yokels rub in the lotions and
-swallow the pills, he permits himself a small,
-but eminently sardonic, hiccup.</p>
-
-<p>It is commonly believed that the first virtue<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>
-of a critic is honesty. As a matter of fact,
-in four cases out of five, honesty is the last
-virtue of a critic. As criticism is practised in
-America, honesty presents itself as the leading
-fault. There is altogether too much honesty.
-The greater the blockhead, the more
-honest he is. And as a consequence the criticism
-of these blockheads, founded upon their
-honest convictions, is worthless. There is
-some hope for an imbecile if he is dishonest,
-but none if he is resolute in sticking to his
-idiocies. If the average American critic were
-to cease writing what he honestly believes and
-dishonestly set down what he doesn&#8217;t believe,
-the bulk of the native criticism would gain
-some common sense and take on much of the
-sound value that it presently lacks. Honesty
-is a toy for first-rate men; when lesser
-men seek to play with it and lick off the paint,
-they come down with colic.</p>
-
-<p>It is further maintained that enthusiasm is
-a supplementary desideratum in a critic, that
-unless he is possessed of enthusiasm he cannot
-impart a warm love for fine things to his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span>
-reader. Surely this, too, is nonsense. Enthusiasm
-is a virtue not in the critic, but in
-the critic&#8217;s reader. And such desired enthusiasm
-can be directly generated by enthusiasm
-no more than a glyceryl nitrate explosion can
-be generated by sulfuric acid. Enthusiasm
-may be made so contagious as to elect a man
-president of the United States or to raise an
-army large enough to win a world war, but
-it has never yet been made sufficiently contagious
-to persuade one American out of a hundred
-thousand that Michelangelo&#8217;s David of
-the Signoria is a better piece of work than the
-Barnard statue of Lincoln. Enthusiasm is
-an attribute of the uncritical, the defectively
-educated: stump speakers, clergymen, young
-girls, opera-goers, Socialists, Italians, such
-like. And not only an attribute, but a
-weapon. But the cultivated and experienced
-man has as little use for enthusiasm as for indignation.
-He appreciates that while it may
-convert a pack of ignoble doodles, it can&#8217;t convert
-any one worth converting. The latter
-must be persuaded, not inflamed. He realizes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span>
-that where a double brass band playing
-&#8220;Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean&#8221; may leave
-a civilized Englishman cold to the virtues of
-the United States, proof that the United
-States has the best bathroom plumbing in the
-world may warm him up a bit. The sound
-critic is not a cheer leader, but a referee. Art
-is hot, criticism cold. Aristotle&#8217;s criticism of
-Euripides is as placid and reserved as Mr.
-William Archer&#8217;s criticism of the latest
-drama at the St. James&#8217;s Theatre; Bruneti&#232;re
-is as calm over his likes as Mr. H. T.
-Parker of the Boston <i>Transcript</i>. There is
-no more enthusiasm in Lessing than there is
-indignation in Walkley. Hazlitt, at a hundred
-degrees emotional Fahrenheit, remains
-critically cool as a cucumber. To find enthusiasm,
-you will have to read the New York
-<i>Times</i>.</p>
-
-<p>Enthusiasm, in short, is the endowment of
-immaturity. The greater the critic, the
-greater his disinclination to communicate
-&#230;sthetic heat. Such communication savours
-of propaganda and, however worthy that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span>
-propaganda, he will have naught to do with its
-trafficking. If the ability to possess and communicate
-enthusiasm is the mark of the true
-critic, then the theatrical page of the New
-York <i>Journal</i> is the greatest critical literature
-in America.</p>
-
-<p>A third contention has it that aloofness and
-detachment are no less valuable to the dramatic
-critic than honesty and enthusiasm.
-Unless I am seriously mistaken, also bosh.
-Dramatic criticism is fundamentally the critic&#8217;s
-art of appraising himself in terms of various
-forms of drama. Or, as I some time ago
-put it, the only sound dramatic critic is the
-one who reports less the impression that this
-or that play makes upon him than the impression
-he makes upon this or that play. Of all
-the forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is
-essentially, and perhaps correctly, the most
-personal. Tell me what a dramatic critic eats
-and drinks, how far north of Ninetieth Street
-he lives, what he considers a pleasant evening
-when he is not in the theatre, and what kind
-of lingerie his wife wears, and I&#8217;ll tell you<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>
-with very few misses what kind of critic he is.
-I&#8217;ll tell you whether he is fit to appreciate
-Schnitzler, or whether he is fit only for Augustus
-Thomas. I&#8217;ll tell you in advance what
-he will think about, and how he will react to,
-Hauptmann, Sacha Guitry or George V.
-Hobart. I&#8217;ll tell you whether he is the sort
-that makes a great to-do when his eagle eye
-spots Sir Nigel Waterhouse, M.P., in Act II
-fingering a copy of the Philadelphia <i>Public
-Ledger</i> instead of the London <i>Times</i>, and
-whether he is the sort that writes &#8220;Mr. John
-Cort has staged the play in his customary
-lavish manner&#8221; when the rise of the curtain
-discloses to him a room elaborately decorated
-in the latest Macy mode. To talk about the
-value of detachment in a dramatic critic is to
-talk about the value of detachment in a
-Swiss mountain guide. The criticism is the
-man; the man the criticism.</p>
-
-<p>Of all forms of criticism, dramatic criticism
-is the most purely biological. Were the
-genii to put the mind of Max Beerbohm into
-the head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse, and vice<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>
-versa, their criticisms would still remain exactly
-as they are. But, on the contrary, were
-the head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse to be placed
-on the body of Max Beerbohm, and vice versa,
-their criticisms would take on points of view
-diametrically opposed to their present. Max
-would begin admiring the Rev. Dr. Charles
-Rann Kennedy and Towse would promptly
-proceed to put on his glasses to get a better
-view of the girl on the end. Every book of
-dramatic criticism&mdash;every single piece of
-dramatic criticism&mdash;is a searching, illuminating
-autobiography. The dramatic critic performs
-a clinic upon himself every time he takes
-his pen in his hand. He may try, as Walkley
-puts it, to substitute for the capital I&#8217;s &#8220;nouns
-of multitude signifying many,&#8221; or some of
-those well-worn stereotypes&mdash;&#8220;It is thought,&#8221;
-&#8220;one may be pardoned for hinting,&#8221; &#8220;will any
-one deny?&#8221; etc., etc.&mdash;by which criticism keeps
-up the pretence that it is not a man but a corporation,
-but he fools no one.</p>
-
-<p>To ask the dramatic critic to keep himself
-out of his criticism, to detach himself, is thus<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>
-a trifle like asking an actor to keep himself out
-of his r&#244;le. Dramatic critics and actors are
-much alike. The only essential difference is
-that the actor does his acting on a platform.
-But, platform or no platform, the actor and
-the dramatic critic best serve their r&#244;les when
-they filter them through their own personalities.
-A dramatic critic who is told to keep
-his personality out of his criticism is in the
-position of an actor who, being physically and
-temperamentally like Mr. John Barrymore, is
-peremptorily directed by a producer to stick
-a sofa pillow under his belt, put on six extra
-heel-lifts, acquire a whiskey voice and play
-Falstaff like the late Sir Herbert Tree. The
-best dramatic critics from the time of Quintus
-Horatius Flaccus (<i>vide</i> the &#8220;Epistola&#8221;) have
-sunk their vivid personalities into their work
-right up to the knees. Not only have they described
-the adventures of their souls among
-masterpieces, but the adventures of their kidneys,
-spleens and <i>c&#230;ca</i> as well. Each has held
-the mirror of drama up to his own nature,
-with all its idiosyncrasies. And in it have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span>
-been sharply reflected not the cut and dried
-features of the professor, but the vital features
-of a red-alive man. The other critics
-have merely held up the mirror to these
-red-alive men, and have reflected not themselves
-but the latter. Then, in their vainglory,
-they have looked again into the hand-glass
-and have mistaken the reflection of the
-parrot for an eagle.</p>
-
-<p>A third rubber-stamp: the critic must have
-sympathy. As properly contend that a surgeon
-must have sympathy. The word is misused.
-What the critic must have is not sympathy,
-which in its common usage bespeaks a
-measure of sentimental concern, but interest.
-If a dramatic critic, for example, has sympathy
-for an actress he can no more criticize
-her with poise than a surgeon can operate on
-his own wife. The critic may on occasion
-have sympathy as the judge in a court of law
-may on occasion have it, but if he is a fair
-critic, or a fair judge, he can&#8217;t do anything
-about it, however much he would like to. Between
-the fair defendant in the lace baby collar<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span>
-and a soft heart, Article X, Section 123, Page
-416, absurdly interposes itself. (In example,
-being a human being with a human being&#8217;s
-weaknesses before a critic, I would often rather
-praise a lovely one when she is bad than an
-unlovely one when she is good&mdash;and, alas, I
-fear that I sometimes do&mdash;but in the general
-run I try to remember my business and behave
-myself. It isn&#8217;t always easy. But I do my
-best, and angels and Lewes could do no
-more.) The word sympathy is further mishandled,
-as in the similar case of the word
-enthusiasm. What a critic should have is not,
-as is common, sympathy and enthusiasm
-<i>before</i> the fact, but <i>after</i> it. The critic who
-enters a theatre bubblingly certain that he is
-going to have a good time is no critic. The
-critic is he who leaves a theatre cheerfully
-certain that he <i>has</i> had a good time. Sympathy
-and enthusiasm, unless they are <i>ex post
-facto</i>, are precisely like prevenient prejudice
-and hostility. Sympathy has no more preliminary
-place in the equipment of a critic than
-in the equipment of an ambulance driver or a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span>
-manufacturer of bird cages. It is the caboose
-of criticism, not the engine.</p>
-
-<p>The trouble with dramatic criticism in
-America, speaking generally, is that where it
-is not frankly reportorial it too often seeks to
-exhibit a personality when there exists no personality
-to exhibit. Himself perhaps conscious
-of this lack, the critic indulges in heroic
-makeshifts to inject into his writings a note of
-individuality, and the only individuality that
-comes out of his perspirations is of a piece
-with that of the bearded lady or the dog-faced
-boy. Individuality of this freak species
-is the bane of the native criticism. The college
-professor who, having nothing to say, tries
-to give his criticism an august air by figuratively
-attaching to it a pair of whiskers and
-horn glasses, the suburban college professor
-who sedulously practises an aloofness from the
-madding crowd that his soul longs to be part
-of, the college professor who postures as a
-man of the world, the newspaper reporter who
-postures as a college professor, the journalist
-who performs in terms of Art between the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span>
-Saks and Gimbel advertisements&mdash;these and
-others like them are the sad comedians in the
-tragical crew. In their heavy attempts to
-live up to their fancy dress costumes, in their
-laborious efforts to conceal their humdrum
-personalities in the uncomfortable gauds of
-Petruchio and Gobbo, they betray themselves
-even to the bus boys. The same performer
-cannot occupy the r&#244;les of Polonius and Hamlet,
-even in a tank town troupe.</p>
-
-<p>No less damaging to American dramatic
-criticism is the dominant notion that criticism,
-to be valuable, must be constructive. That is,
-that it must, as the phrase has it, &#8220;build up&#8221;
-rather than &#8220;tear down.&#8221; As a result of this
-conviction we have an endless repertoire of
-architectonic advice from critics wholly without
-the structural faculty, advice which, were
-it followed, would produce a drama twice as
-poor as that which they criticize. Obsessed
-with the idea that they must be constructive,
-the critics know no lengths to which they will
-not go in their sweat to dredge up cures of
-one sort or another. They constructively<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span>
-point out that Shaw&#8217;s plays would be better
-plays if Shaw understood the punctual technique
-of Pinero, thus destroying a &#8220;C&#230;sar and
-Cleopatra&#8221; to construct a &#8220;Second Mrs. Tanqueray.&#8221;
-They constructively point out the
-trashy aspect of some Samuel Shipman&#8217;s
-&#8220;Friendly Enemies,&#8221; suggest more serious enterprises
-to him, and get the poor soul to write
-a &#8220;The Unwritten Chapter&#8221; which is ten
-times as bad. They are not content to be
-critics; they must also be playwrights. They
-stand in mortal fear of the old recrimination,
-&#8220;He who can, does; he who can&#8217;t, criticizes,&#8221;
-not pausing to realize that the names of Mr.
-Octavus Roy Cohen and Matthew Arnold may
-be taken as somewhat confounding respective
-examples. They note with some irritation that
-the critic for the Wentzville, Mo., <i>Beacon</i> is a
-destructive critic, but are conveniently ignorant
-of the fact&mdash;which may conceivably prove
-something more&mdash;that so was George Farquhar.
-If destructive criticism, in their meaning,
-is criticism which pulls down without
-building up in return, three-fourths of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>
-best dramatic criticism written since the time
-of Boileau, fully filling the definition, is
-worthless. One can&#8217;t cure a yellow fever patient
-by pointing out to him that he should
-have caught the measles. One can&#8217;t improve
-the sanitary condition of a neighbourhood
-merely by giving the outhouse a different coat
-of paint. The foe of destructive criticism is
-the pro-German of American art.</p>
-
-<p>Our native criticism suffers further from
-the commercial Puritanism of its mediums.
-What is often mistaken for the Puritanism of
-the critic is actually the commercial Puritanism
-forced upon him by the owner and publisher
-of the journal in which his writings appear,
-and upon which he has to depend for a
-livelihood. Although this owner and publisher
-is often not personally the Puritan, he
-is yet shrewdly aware that the readers of his
-journal are, and out of this awareness he becomes
-what may be termed a circulation blue-nose.
-Since circulation and advertising revenue
-are twins, he must see to it that the sensibilities
-of the former are not offended. And<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span>
-his circumspection, conveyed to the critic by
-the copy reader or perhaps only sensed, brings
-about the Puritan play-acting by the critic.
-This accounts to no little degree for the hostile
-and uncritical reviews of even the most
-finished risqu&#233; farces, and of the best efforts
-of American and European playwrights to
-depict truthfully and fairly the more unpleasant
-phases of sex. &#8220;I agree with you that
-this last naughty farce of Avery Hopwood&#8217;s
-is awfully funny stuff,&#8221; a New York newspaper
-reviewer once said to me; &#8220;I laughed
-at it until my ribs ached; but I don&#8217;t dare
-write as much. One can&#8217;t praise such things
-in a paper with the kind of circulation that
-ours has.&#8221; It is criticism bred from this commercial
-Puritanism that has held back farce
-writing in America, and I venture to say
-much serious dramatic writing as well. The
-best farce of a Guitry or a Dieudonn&#233;,
-produced in America today without childish
-excisions, would receive unfavourable notices
-from nine newspapers out of ten. The best
-sex drama of a Porto-Riche or a Wedekind<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>
-would suffer&mdash;indeed, already has suffered&mdash;a
-similar fate. I predicted to Eugene
-O&#8217;Neill, the moment I laid down the manuscript
-of his pathological play &#8220;Diff&#8217;rent,&#8221; the
-exact manner in which, two months later, the
-axes fell upon him.</p>
-
-<p>For one critic like Mr. J. Ranken Towse
-who is a Puritan by tradition and training,
-there are a dozen who are Puritans by proxy.
-One can no more imagine a dramatic critic on
-a newspaper owned by Mr. Cyrus H. K. Curtis
-praising Schnitzler&#8217;s &#8220;Reigen&#8221; or Rip&#8217;s and
-Gignoux&#8217;s &#8220;Scandale de Deauville&#8221; than one
-can imagine the same critic denouncing &#8220;Ben
-Hur.&#8221; What thus holds true in journalistic
-criticism holds true in precisely the same way
-in the criticism written by the majority of
-college professors. I doubt that there is a
-college professor in America today who, however
-much he admired a gay, reprobate farce
-like &#8220;Le Rubicon&#8221; or &#8220;L&#8217;Illusioniste,&#8221; would
-dare state his admiration in print. Puritan
-or no Puritan, it is professionally necessary
-for him to comport himself as one. His university<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>
-demands it, silently, sternly, idiotically.
-He is the helpless victim of its &#230;sthetic
-Ku Klux. Behind any drama dealing
-unconventionally with sex, there hovers a
-spectre that vaguely resembles Professor
-Scott Nearing. He sees it ... he reflects
-... he works up a safe indignation.</p>
-
-<p>Dramatic criticism travels, in America,
-carefully laid tracks. Signal lights, semaphores
-and one-legged old men with red flags
-are stationed along the way to protect it at
-the crossings, to make it safe, and to guard it
-from danger. It elaborately steams, pulls,
-puffs, chugs, toots, whistles, grinds and rumbles
-for three hundred miles&mdash;and brings up at
-something like Hinkletown, Pa. It is eager,
-but futile. It is honest, but so is Dr. Frank
-Crane. It is fearless, but so is the actor who
-plays the hero strapped to the papier-m&#226;ch&#233;
-buzz-saw. It is constructive, but so is an embalmer.
-It is detached, but so is a man in the
-Fiji Islands. It is sympathetic, but so is a
-quack prostatitician.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>
-
-<p class="ph2">VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN
-AMERICA</p>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span></p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span>
-<h2 class="nobreak">VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN
-AMERICA</h2>
-</div>
-
-
-<h3>I</h3>
-
-<p class="drop-cap">DRAMATIC criticism, at its best, is
-the adventure of an intelligence
-among emotions. The chief end
-of drama is the enkindling of emotions; the
-chief end of dramatic criticism is to rush into
-the burning building and rescue the metaphysical
-weaklings who are wont to be overcome
-by the first faint whiffs of smoke.</p>
-
-<p>Dramatic criticism, in its common run,
-fails by virtue of its confusion of unschooled
-emotion with experienced emotion. A dramatic
-critic who has never been kissed may
-properly appreciate the readily assimilable
-glories of &#8220;Romeo and Juliet,&#8221; but it is doubtful
-that he will be able properly to appreciate
-the somewhat more evasive splendours of
-&#8220;Liebelei.&#8221; The capability of a judge does<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span>
-not, of course, depend upon his having himself
-once been in jail, nor does the capability
-of a critic depend upon his having personally
-once experienced the emotions of the dramatis
-person&#230;, but that critic is nevertheless the
-most competent whose emotions the dramatis
-person&#230; do not so much anticipatorily stir up
-as recollectively soothe.</p>
-
-<p>All criticism is more or less a statement in
-terms of the present of what one has viewed
-of the past through a delicate, modern reducing-glass.
-Intelligence is made up, in large
-part, of dead emotions; ignorance, of emotions
-that have lived on, deaf and dumb and
-crippled, but ever smiling. The general admission
-that a dramatic critic must be experienced
-in drama, literature, acting and theories
-of production but not necessarily in emotions
-is somewhat difficult of digestion. Such a
-critic may conceivably comprehend much of
-Sheridan, Moli&#232;re, Bernhardt and Yevreynoff,
-but a hundred searching and admirable
-things like the beginning of &#8220;Anatol,&#8221; the
-middle of &#8220;Lonely Lives&#8221; and the end of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span>
-&#8220;The Case of Rebellious Susan&#8221; must inevitably
-be without his ken, and baffle his efforts at
-sound penetration. I do not here posture
-myself as one magnificently privy to all the
-mysteries, but rather as one who, failing perhaps
-to be on very intimate terms with them,
-detects and laments the deficiencies that confound
-him. Experience, goeth the saw, is a
-wise master. But it is, for the critic, an even
-wiser slave. A critic on the Marseilles <i>Petits
-Pois</i> may critically admire &#8220;La Derni&#232;re Nuit
-de Don Juan,&#8221; but it takes an Anatole France
-critically to understand it.</p>
-
-<p>The superficial quality of American emotions,
-sociological and &#230;sthetic, enjoyed by the
-great majority of American critics, operates
-extensively against profundity in American
-criticism&mdash;in that of literature and music no
-less than that of drama. American emotions,
-speaking in the mass, where they are not the
-fixed and obvious emotions ingenerate in most
-countries&mdash;such as love of home, family and
-country, and so on&mdash;are one-syllable emotions,
-primary-colour emotions. The polysyllabic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>
-and pastel emotions are looked on as dubious,
-even degenerate. No man, for example, who,
-though absolutely faithful to his wife, confessed
-openly that he had winked an eye at a
-ballet girl could conceivably be elected to
-membership in the Union League Club. The
-man who, after a cocktail, indiscreetly gave
-away the news that he had felt a tear of joy
-in his eye when he heard the minuet of Mozart&#8217;s
-G minor symphony or a tear of sadness
-when he looked upon Corot&#8217;s &#8220;La Solitude,&#8221;
-would be promptly set down by the other
-members of the golf club as a dipsomaniac
-who was doubtless taking narcotics on the
-side. If a member of the Y. M. C. A. were
-to glance out of the window and suddenly
-ejaculate, &#8220;My, what a beautiful girl!&#8221; the
-superintendent would immediately grab him
-by the seat of the pantaloons and throw him
-down the back stairs. And if a member of
-the American Legion were to sniffle so much
-as once when the orchestra in the Luna Park
-dance hall played &#8220;Wiener Blut,&#8221; a spy
-would seize him by the ear and hurry him before<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span>
-the heads of the organization as a suspicious
-fellow, in all probability of German
-blood.</p>
-
-<p>The American is either ashamed of honest
-emotion or, if he is not ashamed, is soon
-shamed into shame by his neighbours. He is
-profoundly affected by any allusion to Mother,
-the Baby, or the Flag&mdash;the invincible trinity
-of American dramatic hokum&mdash;and his reactions
-thereto meet with the full favour of
-church and state; but he is unmoved, he is
-silently forbidden to be moved, by a love that
-doesn&#8217;t happen to fall into the proper pigeon-hole,
-by a work of great beauty that doesn&#8217;t
-happen to preach a backwoods Methodist sermon,
-by sheer loveliness, or majesty, or unadorned
-truth. And this corsetted emotion,
-mincing, wasp-waisted and furtive, colours
-all native criticism. It makes the dramatic
-critic ashamed of simple beauty, and forbids
-him honestly to admire the mere loveliness of
-such exhibitions as Ziegfeld&#8217;s. It makes him
-ashamed of passion, and forbids him honestly
-to admire such excellent dramas as Georges de<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>
-Porto-Riche&#8217;s &#8220;Amoureuse.&#8221; It makes him
-ashamed of laughter, and forbids him to
-chuckle at the little naughtinesses of Sacha
-Guitry and his own Avery Hopwood. It
-makes him ashamed of truth, and forbids him
-to regard with approbation such a play as
-&#8220;The Only Law.&#8221; The American drama
-must therefore not create new emotions for
-him, but must hold the battered old mirror up
-to his own. It must warm him not with new,
-splendid and worldly emotions, but must satisfy
-him afresh as to the integrity and higher
-merit of his own restricted parcel of emotions.
-It must abandon all new, free concepts of
-love and life, of romance and adventure and
-glory, and must reassure him&mdash;with appropriate
-quiver-music&mdash;that the road to heaven
-is up Main Street and the road to hell down
-the Avenue de l&#8217;Op&#233;ra.</p>
-
-<p>Though there is a regrettable trace of snobbery
-in the statement, it yet remains that&mdash;with
-half a dozen or so quickly recognizable
-exceptions&mdash;the practitioners of dramatic criticism
-in America are in the main a humbly-born,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>
-underpaid and dowdy-lived lot. This
-was as true of them yesterday as it is today.
-And as Harlem, delicatessen-store dinners,
-napkin-rings and the Subway are not, perhaps,
-best conducive to a polished and suavely
-cosmopolitan outlook on life and romance and
-enthralling beauty, we have had a dramatic
-criticism pervaded by a vainglorious homeliness,
-by a side-street &#230;sthetic, and by not a
-little of the difficultly suppressed rancour that
-human nature ever feels in the presence of admired
-yet unachievable situations. Up to
-fifteen years ago, drama in America was compelled
-critically to meet with, and adhere
-strictly to, the standards of life, culture and
-romance as they obtained over on Mr. William
-Winter&#8217;s Staten Island. Since Winter&#8217;s
-death, it has been urged critically to abandon
-the standards of Staten Island and comply
-instead with the eminently more sophisticated
-standards derived from a four years&#8217; study of
-Cicero, Stumpf and the Norwegian system of
-communal elections at Harvard or Catawba
-College, combined with a two weeks&#8217; stay in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span>
-Paris. For twenty years, Ibsen and Pinero
-suffered the American critical scourge because
-they had not been born and brought up
-in a town with a bust of Cotton Mather or
-William Cullen Bryant in its public square,
-and did not think quite the same way about
-things as Horace Greeley. For twenty years
-more, Porto-Riche and Frenchmen like him
-will doubtless suffer similarly because, in a
-given situation, they do not act precisely as
-Mr. Frank A. Munsey or Dr. Stuart Pratt
-Sherman would; for twenty years more,
-Hauptmann and other Germans will doubtless
-be viewed with a certain measure of condescension
-because they have not enjoyed the
-same advantages as Professor Brander Matthews
-in buying Liberty Bonds, at par.</p>
-
-<p>American dramatic criticism is, and always
-has been, essentially provincial. It began by
-mistaking any cheap melodrama like &#8220;The
-Charity Ball&#8221; or &#8220;The Wife&#8221; which was camouflaged
-with a few pots of palms and half a
-dozen dress suits for a study of American society.
-It progressed by appraising as the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>
-dean of American dramatists and as the leading
-American dramatic thinker a playwright
-who wrote such stuff as &#8220;All over this great
-land thousands of trains run every day, starting
-and arriving in punctual agreement because
-this is a woman&#8217;s world! The great
-steamships, dependable almost as the sun&mdash;a
-million factories in civilization&mdash;the countless
-looms and lathes of industry&mdash;the legions of
-labour that weave the riches of the world&mdash;all&mdash;all
-move by the mainspring of man&#8217;s faith
-in woman!&#8221; It has come to flower today in
-denouncing what the best European critics
-have proclaimed to be the finest example of
-American fantastic comedy on the profound
-ground that &#8220;it is alien to American morality,&#8221;
-and in hailing as one of the most acute
-studies of a certain typical phase of American
-life a comedy filched substantially from the
-French.</p>
-
-<p>The plush-covered provincialism of the native
-dramatic criticism, operating in this wise
-against conscientious drama and sound appreciation
-of conscientious drama, constantly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span>
-betrays itself for all the chintz hocus-pocus
-with which it seeks drolly to conceal that provincialism.
-For all its easy incorporation of
-French phrases laboriously culled from the
-back of Webster, its casually injected allusions
-to the &#220;berbrett&#8217;l, Stanislav Pshibuishevsky,
-the excellent <i>cuissot de Chevreuil
-sauce poivrade</i> to be had in the little restaurant
-near the comfort station in the Place Pigalle,
-and the bewitching eyes of the prima ballerina
-in the 1917 Y. M. C. A. show at Epernay, it
-lets its mask fall whenever it is confronted in
-the realistic flesh by one or another of the very
-things against which it has postured its cosmopolitanism.
-Thus does the mask fall, and
-reveal the old pair of suburban eyes, before
-the &#8220;indelicacy&#8221; of French dramatic masterpieces,
-before the &#8220;polished wit&#8221; of British
-polished witlessness, before the &#8220;stodginess&#8221;
-of the German master depictions of stodgy
-German peasantry, before the &#8220;gloom&#8221; of
-Russian dramatic photography, before the
-&#8220;sordidness&#8221; of &#8220;Countess Julie&#8221; and the
-&#8220;wholesomeness&#8221; of &#8220;The Old Homestead.&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>
-Cosmopolitanism is a heritage, not an acquisition.
-It may be born to a man in a wooden
-shack in Hardin County, in Kentucky, or in
-a little cottage in Hampshire in England, or
-in a garret of Paris, but, unless it is so born
-to him, a thousand Cunard liners and Orient
-Expresses cannot bring it to him. All criticism
-is geography of the mind and geometry
-of the heart. American criticism suffers in
-that what &#230;sthetic wanderlust its mind experiences
-is confined to excursion trips, and in
-that what <i>x</i> its heart seeks to discover is an
-unknown quantity only to emotional sub-freshmen.</p>
-
-<p>Criticism is personal, or it is nothing. Talk
-to me of impersonal criticism, and I&#8217;ll talk to
-you of impersonal sitz-bathing. Impersonal
-criticism is the dodge of the critic without personality.
-Some men marry their brother&#8217;s
-widow; some earn a livelihood imitating
-George M. Cohan; some write impersonal
-criticism. Show me how I can soundly criticize
-Mrs. Fiske as Hannele without commenting
-on the mature aspect of the lady&#8217;s <i>stentopgia</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>
-and I shall begin to believe that there may
-be something in the impersonal theory. Show
-me how I can soundly criticize the drama of
-Wedekind without analyzing Wedekind, the
-man, and I shall believe in the theory to the
-full. It is maintained by the apostles of the
-theory that the dramatic critic is in the position
-of a judge in the court of law: that his
-concern, like that of the latter, is merely with
-the evidence presented to him, not with the
-personalities of those who submit the evidence.
-Nothing could be more idiotic. The judge
-who does not take into consideration, for example,
-that&mdash;whatever the nature of the evidence&mdash;the
-average Italian, or negro, or Armenian
-before him is in all probability lying
-like the devil is no more equipped to be a
-sound judge than the dramatic critic who, for
-all the stage evidence, fails to take into consideration
-that Strindberg personally was a
-lunatic, that Pinero, while treating of British
-impulses and character, is himself of ineradicable
-Portuguese mind and blood, that the inspiration
-of D&#8217;Annunzio came not from a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>
-woman out of life but from a woman out of
-the greenroom, and that Shaw is a legal virgin.</p>
-
-<p>Just as dramatic criticism, as it is practised
-in America, is Mason-jar criticism&mdash;criticism,
-that is, obsessed by a fixed determination to
-put each thing it encounters into an air-tight
-bottle and to label it&mdash;so is this dramatic criticism
-itself in turn subjected to the bottling
-and labelling process. A piece of criticism,
-however penetrating, that is not couched in the
-language of the commencement address of the
-president of Millsaps College, and that fails
-to include a mention of the Elizabethan theatre
-and a quotation from Victor Hugo&#8217;s &#8220;Hernani,&#8221;
-is labelled &#8220;journalistic.&#8221; A criticism
-that elects to make its points with humour
-rather than without humour is labelled &#8220;flippant.&#8221;
-A criticism that shows a wide knowledge
-of everything but the subject in hand
-is labelled &#8220;scholarly.&#8221; One that, however
-empty, prefixes every name with a Mr. and
-somewhere in it discloses the fact that the
-critic is sixty-five years old is labelled &#8220;dignified.&#8221;
-One that is full of hard common sense<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span>
-from beginning to end but is guilty of wit is
-derogatorily labelled &#8220;an imitation of Bernard
-Shaw.&#8221; One that says an utterly worthless
-play is an utterly worthless play, and then
-shuts up, is labelled &#8220;destructive&#8221;; while one
-that points out that the same play would be a
-much better play if Hauptmann or De Curel
-had written it is labelled &#8220;constructive and informing.&#8221;
-And so it goes. With the result
-that dramatic criticism in America is a dead
-art language. Like Mr. William Jennings
-Bryan, it has been criticized to death.</p>
-
-<p>The American mania for being on the popular
-side has wrapped its tentacles around
-the American criticism of the theatre. The
-American critic, either because his job depends
-upon it or because he appreciates that
-<i>kudos</i> in this country, as in no other, is a gift
-of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep,
-he seeks the comfortable support of other
-sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a
-guaranteed pay envelope at the end of the
-week, dignity in the eyes of the community,
-an eventual election to the National Institute<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>
-of Arts and Letters and, when he reaches
-three score years and ten and his trousers have
-become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century
-Theatre with a bill made up of all
-the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes
-upon whom he has lavished praise.
-This, in America, is the respected critic. If
-we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley,
-or a Boissard, or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab,
-he would be regarded as not quite nice.
-Certainly the Drama League would not invite
-him to appear before it. Certainly he would
-never be invited to sit between Prof. Richard
-Burton and Prof. William Lyon Phelps at the
-gala banquet to Mr. D. W. Griffith. Certainly,
-if his writings got into the paid prints
-at all, there would be a discreet editor&#8217;s note
-at the top to the effect that &#8220;the publication of
-an article does not necessarily imply that it
-represents the ideas of this publication or of
-its editors.&#8221;</p>
-
-<p>Criticism in America must follow the bell-cow.
-The bell-cow is personal cowardice, artistic
-cowardice, neighbourhood cowardice, or<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>
-the even cheaper cowardice of the daily and&mdash;to
-a much lesser degree&mdash;periodical press.
-Up to within a few years ago it was out of
-the question for a dramatic critic to write
-honestly of the productions of David Belasco
-and still keep his job. One of the leading
-New York evening newspapers peremptorily
-discharged its reviewer for daring to do so;
-another New York newspaper sternly instructed
-its reviewer not to make the same
-mistake twice under the penalty of being cashiered;
-a leading periodical packed off its reviewer
-for the offence. One of the most talented
-critics in New York was several years
-ago summarily discharged by the newspaper
-that employed him because he wrote an honest
-criticism of a very bad play by an obscure
-playwright named Jules Eckert Goodman.
-Another conscientious critic, daring mob opinion
-at about the same time&mdash;he wrote, as I
-recall, something to the effect that the late
-Charles Frohman&#8217;s productions were often
-very shoddy things&mdash;was charily transferred<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span>
-the next day to another post on the newspaper&#8217;s
-staff. I myself, ploughing my familiar
-modest critical course, have, indeed, been
-made not personally unaware of the native
-editorial horror of critical opinions which are
-not shared by the Night School curricula, the
-inmates of the Actors&#8217; Home, the Independent
-Order of B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith, the United Commercial
-Travelers of America, and the Moose.
-Some years ago, a criticism of Hall Caine and
-of his play &#8220;Margaret Schiller,&#8221; which ventured
-the opinion that the M. Caine was perhaps
-not one of the greatest of modern geniuses,
-so frightened the editors of the Philadelphia
-<i>North American</i> and the Cleveland
-<i>Leader</i> that I doubt they have yet recovered
-from the fear of the consequences of printing
-the review.</p>
-
-<p>The ruling ethic of the American press so
-far as the theatre is concerned is one of unctuous
-<i>laissez faire</i>. &#8220;If you can&#8217;t praise,
-don&#8217;t dispraise,&#8221; is the editorial injunction to
-the reviewer. The theatre in America is a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>
-great business&mdash;greater even than the department
-store&mdash;and a great business should be
-treated with proper respect. What if the
-reviewer does not admire &#8220;The Key to
-Heaven&#8221;? It played to more than <i>twelve
-thousand dollars</i> last week; it <i>must</i> be good.
-The theatre must be helped, and the way to
-help it is uninterruptedly to speak well of it.
-Fine drama? Art? A newspaper has no
-concern with fine drama and art; the public is
-not interested in such things. A newspaper&#8217;s
-concern is primarily with news. But is not
-dramatic swindling, the selling of spurious
-wares at high prices, news? Is not an attempt
-to corrupt the future of the theatre as
-an honourable institution and an honourable
-business also news, news not so very much less
-interesting, perhaps, than the three column account
-of an ex-Follies girl&#8217;s adulteries? The
-reviewer, for his impertinence, is assigned
-henceforth to cover the Jefferson Market
-police court.</p>
-
-<p>The key-note of the American journalistic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>
-attitude toward the theatre is a stagnant
-optimism. Dramatic art and the red-haired
-copy boy are the two stock jokes of the
-American newspaper office. Here and there
-one encounters a reviewer who, through
-either the forcefulness or the amiability of his
-personality, is successful for a short time in
-evading the editorial shackles&mdash;there are a few
-such still extant as I write. But soon or late
-the rattle of the chains is heard and the reviewer
-that was is no more. He is an American,
-and must suffer the penalty that an
-American who aspires to cultured viewpoint
-and defiant love of beauty must ever suffer.
-For&mdash;so George Santayana, late professor of
-philosophy in Harvard University, in &#8220;Character
-and Opinion in the United States&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;the
-luckless American who is drawn to poetic
-subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions,
-nevertheless has the categorical excellence of
-work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity
-dinned into his ears: every door is open
-in this direction and shut in the other; so that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>
-he either folds up his heart and withers in a
-corner&mdash;in remote places you sometimes find
-such a solitary gaunt idealist&mdash;or else he flies
-to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save
-his soul&mdash;or perhaps not to save it.&#8221;</p>
-
-
-<p>&nbsp;</p>
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p>&nbsp;</p>
-<p>&nbsp;</p>
-
-<div class="transnote">
-<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER&#8217;S NOTE:</p>
-
-
-<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
-
-<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
-
-<p>On page 83, second sentence, after the word So, it appears that a word is missing. The transcriber is unable to ascertain what the missing word, if any, might be.</p>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="pgx" />
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